The film is inspired by the story of Rita Atria, a key witness in a major Mafia investigation in Sicily.

Beginning in 1985 in Balata, Sicily, the eleven-year-old Rita Mancuso witnessed the assassination of her beloved father Don Michele by a rival Mafia family.

Determined to avenge the murders, she decides to break the code of silence and goes to an anti-Mafia prosecutor in Palermo with her detailed diaries to be used as evidence.

Being forced to flee her village, she is put into witness protection and transferred to a safe house in Rome.

[1] According to a New York Times movie review, the film is hobbled by sluggish direction by Amenta, who previously addressed Atria’s story in his 1997 documentary, One Girl Against the Mafia: Diary of a Sicilian Rebel.