Documentary on a new photographer worth watching for its crime-scene photographs

 There's one great thing about Kim Longinotto's 2019 documentary, Shooting the Mafia, and that's the b/w stills of the photographer profiled in this film, the news photographer Letizia Battaglia, a brave woman who has spent most of her late-to-life (she didn't take up photography until age 40, some 30 years back) career covering the news, which is to say primarily covering the doings of the mob, in her native Palerma, Sicily. Her shots - bodies, sinister figures, police procedurals, every image we associate w/ the world of crime and corruption, but each a startling moment captures often at great risk and always beautifully composed so that the formal beauty of the images contrast sharply against the often gruesome and sinister matters of record. LB was often threatened by those trying to intimidate her - she was a particular target as the first woman photographer to cover this beat - and deserves kudos for perseverance and fortitude. As a documentary film, however, this work fall short or flat for a # of reasons: way too much time spent on telling us the life story of Battaglia, including information about her youthful beauty and her many love affairs; complete confusion as to which images from the past are Battaglia's and which are standard news or home-movie footage from the time; lack of context as to how LB got her shots and about how her career changed and progressed; not much at least in the first half - I probably won't watch the rest - about her relationship w/ those she covered may have had an effect on her work and on her life, which was always at great risk. All told, probably worth seeing esp for fans of WeeGee and other great news photographer working in b/w, though it's poorly paced as a documentary, at least for those who knew little or nothing about LB's work.