My name is battle

Letizia Battaglia photographed Mafia crimes for over twenty years, dedicating her life to a relentless mission: exposing corruption and giving a voice to the forgotten. Through her iconic images and the testimonies of those who knew her best, the violent years of modern Italian history come to life—seen through the lens of a photographer profoundly in love with freedom.

Director: Cécile Allegra

Franco-Italian, Cécile Allegra has directed numerous documentaries and received over 20 awards in France and abroad.
In 2010, she directed Haïti, la blessure de l’âme, followed by La Brigade, section anti-narcotiques de Naples in 2011. In 2012, she created Une enfance au travail : en Europe aussi. In 2015, she received the Albert Londres Prize for Under the Skin: A Journey Into Savagery, co-directed with Delphine Deloget, an odyssey following six survivors of torture camps from Egypt to Sweden.
In 2016, she founded the NGO Limbo, which supports survivors of torture camps on their recovery journeys. She directed the films Électricité, le montant de la facture and Mafia and Italy: A Bloody Pact, which won the Scam Star award in 2018. She also published Le Salaire des enfants, a finalist for the European Book Prize in 2017.
Her first series, 800 fois le Watergate, received support from CNC’s FAIA (Itineraries). In 2018, she directed Libya, Unspeakable Crime, which won the Scam Star award in 2019 and the Reporters Without Borders Prize at FIPADOC. In 2019, as a laureate of the Storytelling Institute in Cannes, she wrote the feature film Vesuvio, scheduled for release in February 2025 (Picomedia/Medusa).
In 2022, Le Chant des vivants received the Audience Award, the Paris Solidarity Prize, and the UNAFORIS Prize at the Social Film Festival. In January 2023, the film was released in theaters, attracting over 13,000 viewers to the story of a year spent with a group of survivors from torture camps, working to write their song of exile.
In 2023-2024, she is writing and directing the documentary Her Name Is Battle, produced by Nilaya Productions for France 5, and the fictional feature film Criature, produced by Picomedia for Medusa (release scheduled for February 2025).
As a screenwriter, she is distinguished by her ability to bring to life stories largely inspired by her experience as a documentarian, with an urgency to tell stories of resistance, both in Italy and around the world.