An innovative hybrid of documentary and fiction interspersed with footage of the director trying to find his friend, the investigative journalist Mauro De Mauro, who disappeared while doing research for the film. Cannes 1972 Golden Palm Award.
Italian businessman Enrico Mattei helped change Italy's future, first as freedom-fighter against the Nazis. In the aftermath of World War II he succeeded in preventing the sale of the nascent Italian oil industry to US companies and developed them in the Eni, a state-owned oil company which rivalled the "Seven Sisters" for oil and gas deals in Northern African and Middle Eastern countries. On 27 October 1962 his private airplane crashed, one minute before it should land at Milan airport. Officially, he died in a flight accident, but many journalists explored other plausible reasons for his death.
"Rosi casts the film along the lines of an inquest, and pieces together not simply a picture of Enrico Mattei, but of the dynamics of capital, the role of the media, and the traps to which the individualist hero can't help but fall prey." (VG, Time Out)