In the early 1980’s, an all out war rages between Sicilian mafia bosses over the heroin trade. Tommaso Buscetta, a made man, flees to hide out in Brazil. Back home, scores are being settled and Buscetta watches from afar as his sons and brother are killed in Palermo, knowing he may be next. Arrested and extradited to Italy by the Brazilian police, Buscetta makes a decision that will change everything for the Mafia: He decides to meet with Judge Giovanni Falcone and betray the eternal vow he made to the Cosa Nostra.

Born in Bobbio, near Piacenza, Marco Bellocchio had a strict Catholic upbringing – his father was a lawyer, his mother a schoolteacher. He began studying philosophy in Milan but then decided to enter film school, making his first film, FISTS IN THE POCKET, funded by family members and shot on family property, in 1965.Bellocchio's films include IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER – a satire on a Catholic boarding school that shares affinities with Lindsay Anderson's IF .... (1972) and MY MOTHER'S SMILE (2002), which told the story of a wealthy Italian artist, a 'default-Marxist and atheist', who suddenly discovers that the Vatican is proposing to make his detested mother a saint.In 1995 he directed a documentary about the Red Brigades and the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, entitled BROKEN DREAMS. In 2003, he directed a feature film on the same theme, GOOD MORNING, NIGHT. He finished SORELLE MAI, an experimental film that was shot over ten years with the students of six separate workshops playing themselves.