Synopsis
A story that crossed borders, governments, and consciences, following the path of a young Italian researcher whose academic work collided with a political system founded on repression. The film retraces the months leading up to his disappearance in Cairo in January 2016, the discovery of his body, and the subsequent investigations, exposing a web of responsibilities, omissions, and deliberate misdirections that turned a murder into an unresolved international case.
The narrative unfolds through the voices of those who lived this story firsthand: Giulio’s parents, Paola Deffendi and Claudio Regeni, and the lawyer Alessandra Ballerini, who stood beside them throughout the long legal battle. Their testimonies guide the viewer along a trajectory that moves from the private dimension of grief into the political and diplomatic sphere, revealing how difficult it is to obtain truth and justice when geopolitical balances and economic interests are at stake.
Through archival materials, images of the locations, and judicial documents, the film reconstructs the context in which Giulio Regeni was working: an Egypt marked by pervasive control over civil society, where research on independent trade unions is perceived as a threat to the established order. His death, together with the torture inflicted upon him, thus becomes the point at which a broader system emerges—one built on surveillance, institutional violence, and the systematic denial of responsibility.
In parallel, the documentary follows the evolution of the judicial proceedings initiated in Italy against members of the Egyptian security apparatus, portraying a trial that advances through obstacles, delays, and absences, and that makes evident the gap between the formal affirmation of rights and their actual enforcement.
Review
4 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 21. January 2026
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
This is a work that interrogates the relationship between truth, power, and memory, moving along a constant line of tension between private suffering and public responsibility. The story of Giulio Regeni, the Italian researcher killed in Cairo in 2016, is now inscribed in the European collective consciousness; what the film succeeds in doing is restoring to it a temporal and moral density that goes beyond news reporting and ritualized outrage.
Manetti deliberately distances himself from the most recognizable forms of investigative cinema and true crime. His gaze does not seek the scoop or sudden revelation, but constructs a careful, almost obstinate immersion into events. The narrative proceeds through stratification, accumulating images, voices, and documents without ever yielding to the spectacle of violence. Tragedy is not displayed; it is evoked through absence, silence, and the persistence of what remains without justice. Regeni’s death is not an anomaly, but an event coherent with a system of control sustained by surveillance and fear.
At the center of the film are Giulio’s parents, Paola Deffendi and Claudio Regeni. Manetti observes them without building a rhetoric of pain around their presence. Their role is not emotional, but political. Mourning is translated into practice: meeting institutions, reading documents, insisting. Their action contains nothing heroic; it is a form of ordinary resistance, grounded in repetition and duration. Over the course of the film, their search for truth becomes a daily resistance to institutional opacity and diplomatic erasure.
Constant at the core of the film is the void produced by Giulio’s disappearance, visible in the faces and words of his parents, whom the documentary renders with rare ethical rigor. They are never transformed into rhetorical symbols of suffering, nor into civic heroes to be celebrated; they are shown as individuals marked by a determination born of loss and transformed into political practice. Their struggle for truth becomes, throughout the film, a form of everyday resistance against institutional obscurity and diplomatic removal.
The presence of lawyer Alessandra Ballerini introduces a second narrative line, more strictly juridical, which never disrupts the balance of the film. The trial, the hearings, and the testimonies of Italian state representatives are not treated as moments of resolution, but as fragments of a broader mechanism in which justice appears constantly deferred, suspended, obstructed. The film lucidly shows how law, when confronted with geopolitical interests and economic alliances, risks becoming a compromised instrument.
Particularly effective is the use of archival material, which Manetti employs not as simple informational support but as living matter. Images of the Egyptian uprisings, official statements, press conferences, and television news do not merely explain events; they mark the passage of time as it unfolds. This is an archive that does not pacify the past, but keeps it in a state of permanent tension, reminding the viewer that what is being recounted is neither finished nor definitively archived.
In this sense, the sonic dimension also plays a decisive role. Piernicola Di Muro’s original music does not accompany the images emotionally or illustratively, but works through subtraction, sustaining the film’s internal rhythm without ever forcibly guiding interpretation. Sound becomes an element of continuity, an underground current that binds together the different layers of the narrative while amplifying its ethical dimension.
This is a story that demands attention, support, and interrogation, and that requires comfortable forms of neutrality to be put into question. It is a work that informs, but also asks the viewer not only to know, but to take a position. In doing so, it restores to Giulio Regeni not the image of an abstract victim, but that of a young scholar whose field research collided head-on with the mechanisms of repression of a power that does not tolerate a critical gaze. A necessary documentary, because it reminds us that evil is never merely individual, but systemic—and that recognizing it is the first step toward refusing to normalize it.
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell
George Orwell
