Sisto, the friendly ghost who haunts a loving tribute to a legendary cafe

Making any documentary comes with a sense of responsibility – to the subject, to the truth, to finding a new way to tell a familiar story. But when the subject is one of the most famous cafes in all of Australia, a place synonymous with both joy and tragedy, that obligation is especially acute.

“I’m a long-time patron of Pellegrini’s, I would get my coffees there every day – twice, sometimes three times,” says Rob Gabriel, an IT specialist who has become an unlikely film producer purely because he couldn’t help himself. “And then it came to me after Sisto died – not straight away, about three or four years later – there was this calling that said, I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but this story needs to be told.”

Sisto, of course, was Sisto Malaspina, the beloved co-owner of the legendary cafe at the top end of Bourke Street who was killed in a stabbing attack in November 2018 while on a mission to buy chocolates to celebrate the birth of a grandchild. The senseless murder – committed as part of a one-man terror attack – sent Melbourne into grief. But nowhere was that felt more intensely than at Pellegrini’s itself.

Sisto’s son, David, now runs Pellegrini’s, and Gabriel and director Frank Lotito weren’t the first people to pitch the idea of a documentary to him. Understandably, perhaps, he had his reservations, until Lotito – an experienced filmmaker (with extensive credits in TV cooking shows, as well as the most recent Wog Boy movie) – outlined his vision.

“I told him I would approach it with a certain sensibility,” Lotito says. “It’s not a journalistic piece, per se, it’s really a tribute to Pellegrini’s and its pioneers, his dad and our culture, the Italian culture, and what these immigrants achieved back then. I kind of sold him on that, and a couple of weeks later he gave us permission. I didn’t really want to do it unless we had his approval, obviously.”

It would be impossible to tell this story without reference to Sisto Malaspina, who bought the cafe with Nino Pangrazio in 1974, from Leo and Vildo Pellegrini, the brothers who had founded it 20 years earlier. “It’s hard to replace someone like Sisto,” says Lotito.

“The memories are there,” adds Gabriel. “You walk in and there are photos of Sisto everywhere you look.”

It was important, Lotito says, that the film acknowledge that awful chapter, without being overwhelmed by it.

“We tried to be quite sensitive,” he says. “There’s so much news footage we could use, but it’s so confronting. We just didn’t want to make it about that, but at the same time, we wanted his closest people to tell their side of the events of the day, to give viewers an insight into what they were feeling and how it played out.”

Pellegrini’s manages that just fine. In its brisk 45 minutes, it packs in a lot: how and why Leo and Vildo set up their café just a few doors down from Florentino’s, where their father had worked in the kitchen when they were little (and where Leo eventually became head waiter); the celebrities who have eaten and sipped coffee or granita in the long narrow room (including Russell Crowe, looking so dishevelled, with his bushy beard and plastic shopping bags in hand, that Sisto mistook him for a homeless man); the long-serving staff, including one who had spent 50 years traversing the narrow space behind the counter before retiring last year (having found retirement a little dull, he’s now back working a day or two each week).

Mostly, though, it’s a tribute to the place as a touchstone of a particular aspect of Australian history that Lotito feels is not often acknowledged.

“It’s a unique culture being first- or second-generation Italian-Australian, it’s a very particular thing,” the director says. “We’re kind of weird – we’re not Italian, we’re not Australian, we’re somewhere in between. And I feel we don’t tell enough of those stories.

“I wanted to tell this story because it’s very much a reflection of what our forefathers went through when they came to this country. They didn’t know the language – my dad came to this country with a suitcase and 10 bucks in his pocket – and they worked, they started their own businesses, they did well, they built their own houses.

“For me, it really is about that,” he adds. “Keeping their culture alive, and telling those stories.”

Pellegrini’s screens at the Williamstown Italian Social Club on Sunday, September 21, with screenings at other Italian community centres to follow. Details: pellegrinisfilm.com

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