Avetrana – Qui è non Hollywood is the new Disney + true crime series coming out on October 25th. Consisting of 4 episodes of 60 minutes each, this series retraces in a fictionalized form the crime of Sarah Scazzi, the fifteen-year-old from Avetrana, in the province of Taranto, killed on 26 August 2010 at the hands of her aunt and cousin Sabrina Misseri and Cosima Serrano who are currently serving a life sentence. That of Avetrana was a case of great media resonance where even the announcement of the discovery of the body was made live on TV, in the Rai program Who saw it?, where Sarah’s mother herself, connected from Avetrana, discovered that her daughter had died in front of thousands of viewers.
The series is based on the book “Sarah the girl from Avetrana”, written by Carmine Gazzanni and Flavia Piccinni and published by Fandango Libri and even before its debut it ended up at the center of controversy, accused of focusing everything on a spectacularisation of pain disrespectful towards the family involved in this terrible crime case.
We at uisjournal.com interviewed Anna Anna Ferzetti and Giancarlo Commare, two of the protagonists of the series who respectively play the journalist who made the Avetrana case national and Ivano Russo, one of the key and most controversial characters in the Sarah Scazzi affair.
Avetrana – Qui è non Hollywood is a series that was criticized even before it came out, defined as “in bad taste”, “a spectacularisation of pain”, how do you respond to these controversies and why, instead, is it worth seeing?
Anna Ferzetti: “Criticized? Well it’s like looking at the cover and not opening the book. There’s always a tendency to judge and criticize things before seeing them, but in my opinion it’s important to retrace that period with great respect, honor and rigor as we did .
In this case I represent the media side so in some way I was helped because I didn’t have a specific person as a reference but a mechanism, a system which at the time was very morbid, very violent, at least as far as I remember.
The interesting thing for me was working on the female journalist, on what can happen to a person who finds herself there and realizes that perhaps she has gone too far, perhaps she has crossed the line a little.”
Giancarlo Commare: “I believe that the same people who criticized before seeing the series will realize, upon seeing it, the great respect that there was in this story towards those who suffered and towards that pain.
I believe that with this series we have tried as much as possible to tell the human aspect of this whole matter clearly with fictionalized dialogues for narrative purposes, however we have remained very faithful to what we know but we have tried to tell what we had not seen, that is, the human side for better or for worse”
And how psychologically difficult was it for you to be part of this series?
Anna Ferzetti: “We actors are often asked to play uncomfortable characters, the important thing is not to judge them and try to understand them, ask ourselves questions and that’s what we try to do otherwise we could never tell sad stories like this. It was exciting, challenging but of great pride to be able to be part of it.”
Avetrana – It’s not Hollywood here: the review