The film that brought Rosi international prominence, Salvatore Giuliano is the first of his signature “mosaic”-style exposés of real characters and incidents. Salvatore Giuliano was a Sicilian bandit turned Mafia boss who, after the war, became an important player in Sicily's guerilla independence movement. (Interestingly, Rosi's script collaborator was Franco Solinas, who later wrote The Battle of Algiers and State of Siege.) The film opens on Giuliano's corpse and unfolds back to his life and times and forward to events following his death. Giuliano himself is barely glimpsed; but this portrait of betrayal and compromises with authority-Mafia and State in collusion to keep the peasants and urban poor in their place-set against the scarred landscape of Sicily, explains much about the life that produced this illustrious corpse. Rosi's elliptical style is not concerned with the “truth” of historical events, but with the act of seeking the truth, which is crucial and unending.