An unresolved Italian mystery that takes on the shades of a spy thriller. An international intrigue unfolding between 1978 and 1980, like a searing, chaotic mass of events that continues to ignite the dark shadows of Italy’s past even today.
Forty-five years after the murder of Piersanti Mattarella, “Magma: Mattarella, the Perfect Crime” reopens the wounds of one of the darkest chapters in Italian history. This documentary film delves into the lives of those Christian Democrats—Catholics and reformers—who, in the 1970s, recognized both the necessity and the possibility of political change: an alliance with the Italian Communist Party to form a government of national unity. It was an ambitious project that, for many of them, ended in tragedy—first through political isolation, and then through physical elimination.
The film unfolds around an unresolved mystery: the assassination of Piersanti Mattarella, President of the Sicilian Region, immersing the viewer in the searing, chaotic cascade of events that occurred between 1978 and 1980.
With the pulse of a thriller and the weight of a true story, the docufilm revisits the murders of Moro, Bachelet, and Reina, connecting Mattarella’s killing to the Bologna train station bombing on August 2, 1980. It promises to pull the audience into a journey through that seething “magma” of events, which still simmers beneath our feet.
Magma is more than a documentary—it’s a punch to the gut, an invitation to confront the past of our nation and reflect on the shadows that continue to haunt our present.