“Better to die of cancer than of hunger,” are words you may well hear on Priolo beach in Sicily. In the shadows of the lovely city of Syracuse lies one of Europe’s largest petrochemical complexes. 70 years after the arrival of the first refineries, the area seems to have been abandoned to its fate as poison taints the sky, water and land. Woven around fragments supplied by residents who resist, are resigned or choose to look the other way, the film Toxic Sicily sets out to tell the tale of a place sacrificed on the altar of progress, modernity and globalisation.
