Palazzina LAF

Caterino is a worker at the Ilva factory in Taranto. When the company executives decide to use him as a spy to identify the workers they should get rid of, Caterino starts to track his colleagues, in search of reasons to report them. He then asks to be assigned himself to the Palazzino LAF where as punishment, some employees sit out their time with no job assignment. There he discovers that what looks like paradise is actually a strategy to psychologically break troublesome workers.

COMMENTARY
LAF stands for cold rolling mill, and the LAF was the building where the owners and management of the ILVA factory in Taranto decided to put the office workers who had opposed the ‘novation’ of their contract, demoting them to factory workers. ILVA couldn’t fire them, so they shunted them off to the LAF, to twiddle their thumbs. Some just sat on the stairs; others danced or played cards, all let down and frustrated, worried about possible spies. Michele Riondino makes his directorial and screenwriting debut with a film that has a solid social agenda, its echoes of anger and the grotesque recalling Elio Petri’s Lulu the Tool. In the surreal void of the LAF building, laughter, albeit bitter and desperate, is a given. Riondino also stars in the film alongside Vanessa Scalera and Elio Germano in a roll that channels Volonté’s paranoid characters.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
The story of Palazzina LAF was the first case of mobbing in Italy. 79 highly qualified workers were forced to spend entire days in what they themselves defined in court as “something of a madhouse”. The facts shown in the film came out of the interviews with former Ilva workers and formerly confined employees, and the final events are gleaned from the court records which led to the conviction of the accused, and to the award of damages to the victims. This film intends to provide a social overview, it does not seek to illustrate what is taking place in Taranto today, but what we are living through is most certainly the result of the indifference of those who in 1995 sacrificed an entire city on the altar of their own capital.