Abstract

The ethics of bearing witness to testimony on true crime events is affected by the way a documentary chooses to frame it and the way it is contextualized within the larger narrative of events. To create empathy for a subject’s experiences, films must detail the danger and horrors witnessed, but risks framing testimony within victimhood. Topics of violent crime, especially on the scale of the Sicilian mafia, encourage audience expectations of sensation and intrigue. These expectations are influenced by the conventions and popularity of the true crime genre which threaten to drown out individual testimony and reduce films to intriguing exposé of mafia secrets. This article explores Kim Longinotto’s Shooting the Mafia (2019) as an ethical practice that attempts to avoid such pitfalls and empower its subject to challenge true crime conventions.