TORONTO – “Respect for Meredith”. That’s what residents of Perugia are demanding from their Mayor after she permitted Hulu [the Disney owned streaming service] to start filming Blue Moon in their city. Blue Moon is an eight-part drama series starring Grace Van Patten (Tell Me Lies) as Amanda Knox – an American college student who was charged with murder seventeen years ago, before eventually being acquitted in 2015.
The series centers on Amanda Knox’s harrowing journey after being wrongfully imprisoned for her roommate Meredith Kercher’s murder, per the official synopsis. While the production, co-executive produced by Knox, outlines her battle to prove her innocence and regain her freedom, it’s not the first project to do so.
Knox has landed deals for three major projects since her 2007 arrest in Perugia, of which the media coverage in Italy and abroad was nothing short of unchecked sensationalism. Amanda’s false statements upon arrest, convoluted stories from other suspects and the horrific details of Kercher’s murder stirred up a caldron of fury among the victim’s family, the locals and the Italian authorities. The story gripped the public and without fail, Hollywood swooped in to capitalize. There was the 2011 film Amanda Knox: Murder on trial in Italy which was followed by her 2013 memoir Waiting to be Heard – for which she was reportedly paid $3.8 million. She then inevitably secured a Netflix documentary titled Amanda Knox, in 2015.
And this more than anything has rubbed not only the residents of Perugia the wrong way, but Kercher’s family whose lawyer Francesco Maresca had this say: “We’ve already spoken about this case too much and at a certain point you have to close the chapter. However, Knox does not want to close the chapter. This continuous stirring is a demonstration of a lack of sensitivity. She earns money, obtains visibility on the television after many years. It seems that Knox does not want people to forget about this story and does all she can to keep it alive”.
The backlash from the locals even prompted Perugia’s mayor Vittoria Ferdinandi to issue an apology and explanation: “We could have not authorized the filming of five scenes in Perugia,” she explained. “But they would have been filmed in any other town in our region. We believed that allowing [the scenes] to be filmed here would provide us an element of greater guarantee and control because as we requested we are able to view and authorize every scene”. An odd justification to offer a family and community who were traumatized by the news, less than twenty years ago.
Her defenders will say that Amanda Knox is within her rights to capitalize on the story and to profess her innocence – as she was ultimately acquitted. But her unending filmic exploits and multimillion-dollar deals have [in the eyes of many] turned her from a victim to an opportunist. Upon hearing the news about Blue Moon’s production, Meredith’s sister Stephanie stated that her family found it “difficult to understand” how Knox’s series served any purpose.
Perugia Banner image courtesy of www.ansa.it; photo of Amanda Knox courtesy of Getty Images
Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix
