The film “Diaz: Don’t Clean Up This Blood” (2012), directed by Daniele Vicari, reconstructs a key episode in recent European political memory: the police repression during the G8 summit in Genoa. It is a work focused on institutional violence and the cover-up of events that took place at the Armando Diaz School.
The historical context is set in July 2001, during the G8 counter-summit in Genoa, when thousands of people mobilized against the global neoliberal model. The raid on the school on the night of July 21–22 became a symbol of police brutality, leaving dozens of people seriously injured and one person in a coma, in a climate of intense political and social tension in the Italian State and across Europe.
The film presents a choral narrative of what happened inside the Diaz School, where around 90 activists and journalists were sleeping. More than 300 police officers entered the building in an operation that resulted in beatings, arbitrary arrests, and destruction of evidence, according to later judicial rulings. The story is presented as a reconstruction based on real testimonies and legal documents of what is considered one of the largest human rights violations since World War II in a Western country.
From a narrative perspective, the film uses characters inspired by real individuals: journalists, activists, lawyers, and law enforcement officers. This fragmented, choral structure allows multiple perspectives of the event to be shown, supported by thousands of pages of legal files and hundreds of hours of recordings. The aim is to achieve the most faithful representation of the events possible.
In production terms, the film was an Italian–French–Romanian co-production premiered at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival. Its political impact was reinforced in a context shaped by the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and the “Indignados” movement, sparking debate on the limits of police repression in contemporary democracies. The director acknowledged the emotional difficulty of handling such violent material without falling into sensationalism.