This Italian award-winning comedy works best if you’re an aficionado of recent Italian political history, with its insider jokes and incidental characters. Arturo is a young boy whose obsession with the Mafia’s presence in his city exceeds even his passion for Flora, the beautiful schoolmate who remains his main love interest until adulthood. As well as taking on the Cosa Nostra in this raucous piece of satire, Arturo (played by director and co-writer Pif, born Pierfrancesco Diliberto) sticks it to the Sicilian bureaucrats and politicians whose apathy and corruption has allowed the syndicate to flourish unchecked.

Told in flashback, Arturo daydreams about his passion for Flora (Capotondi), whom he first met when they were in the same class at school. There is also something poignantly bizarre in the fact that they and their families share their Palermo neighbourhood with the Mafia, who are bent on assassinating every judge, policeman and journalist who dares to speak out against them. It’s brutal but the film is also suggesting that these outrages have become almost routine. The communal attention span is so short that between assassinations, life goes on regardless.