Seventy

A short and lively documentary feature that centres around the raffle of two baskets of food being run by a local community in Taranto. Now this isn't the best organised since rather than just write a phone number on the tickets so they know who has won, they have to shout out "settanta" for ages trying to get the winners to claim their prizes. What this process does, though, is allow us to meet some of the residents who have lived in this heavily polluted zone for many a year. The nearby Ilva steelworks are largely responsible for that, despite a furore in 2012 that'd have been fit for Erin Brockovich. The residents are faced with quite a dilemma. Stay there, work and risk ill-health or see the plant shut, their environment improve but their jobs and livelihoods go the way of the dodo. The single camera photography is intimate and lively and you do get a sense that this is a society that's been left to fend for itself. Anyone found that ticket, yet?