Enrico Mattei (1906 – 1962), founder and first president of the Italian state energy company ENI, was celebrated during his lifetime as “the most powerful Italian since Augustus”. He provided his resource-poor country with cheap crude oil and gas through aggressive negotiating with the Anglo American oil cartels, and therewith laid the groundwork for the Italian economic revitalization of the 60s. During the climax of the Cuban crisis in October 1962, and as the Cold War threatened to become the Third World War, the ENI company jet crashed near Milan. The three people on board – Enrico Mattei, the pilot and an American journalist – died in the crash. Bernhard Pfletschinger and Claus Bredenbrock describe how, through the decades, the official explanation of the crash has grown shakier, and evidence of an assassination has mounted. An assassination that the highest levels of Italian government call an accident, and, at the same time, classify as a state secret. The filmmakers relied on the official reports of the Pavian courts (which had jurisdiction of the crash site Bascapé) and uncover amazing explanations for how, in the plane of the most powerful and protected man in Italy, a bomb with an extremely complex detonation system could be so easily placed. Pfletschinger and Bredenbrock are successful in drawing attention to a decisive chapter in Italian – and European – post-war history, and to shed light on a new perspective of independent European politics. Nominated for the Grimme Preis 2002 Supported by the Filmstiftung NRW