Pfor those who have never heard of it: Poison it is the title that Pablo Trincia gave to an incredible and terrible legal matter otherwise known as “the devils of the lower Modena area”. Between 1997 and 1998, in three small towns in the province of Modena, over twenty people were accused of pedophilia and Satanism; sixteen children were removed from their biological parents and placed in the care of other families.
The incredible part is that, in the face of these definitive separations, the charges of Satanism in the following stages of judgment proved to be inconsistent and some of the defendants were even completely acquitted, after a judicial ordeal that lasted more than a decade.
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In 2017, Trincia took the podcast from this story Poison, modeled on the American Serial in the merger between the true crime and the first-person narration typical of podcasters. Exciting and hugely successful, Poison has strongly questioned the work of the investigators, but from the model of Serial it has also inherited some very complex ethical problems: where does the right to report end and the duty not to harm the people involved begins? In one episode, for example, Trincia lurks in the street to meet one of the estranged children, now almost thirty. I remember jumping in my chair while listening: is it okay to show up out of nowhere, with a tape recorder, asking a boy to talk about the abuse he suffered as a child?
These problems emerge strongly in the five-episode documentary directed by Hugo Berkely and created by Ettore Paternò (on Prime from 25 May). This is not a simple adaptation: on the one hand, the series is a sort of extra episode, because it follows the procedural story up to now and connects the dots between this case and Bibbiano’s investigations; on the other hand, here the facts are retraced with a further, third glance, opposing the voice of the accused, which predominated in the podcast, a counterpoint represented by the psychologist Valeria Donati and the True Voices committee, made up of foster families and (now ex) children walk away. As always in successful documentaries, at the end of the viewing there are few certainties and a great desire to know more.
Poison, Ettore Paternò and Hugo Berkeley, Prime Video, 25 May