Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara

2009, Abel Ferrara's documentary year of debut. A chiaroscuro, a hybrid product of reality and fiction, personal and others' stories that start immediately from the darkest face of the city: the female district house of Pozzuoli. It is from here that the journey of "Napoli, Napoli, Napoli" begins, between the interviews and the embarrassed looks of the prisoners on which he managed to insert three different screenplays by three different screenwriters: Peppe Lanzetta, Gaetano Di Vaio, Maurizio Braucci.

Sketches of stories, dreams that overlap the substratum of reality, reformulating its meaning. Three detours that spread the plot of the work, scattering it everywhere in flashes of vision, hints of intuition, ghosts, obsessions. A precarious structure, clearly incomplete, close to collapse, which seems to make the bradyseism of secular tensions that are becoming more and more urgent and pressing.It gives us back the face of a complex city, seductive as it is indecipherable, of its vital and brutal humanity, passionate and violent, in one word: Partenopea. A journey among characters and enviroment that tell the variety of a southern metropolis. It ranges from the narrow cells of the prison, from the alleys of the Spanish Quarters, from the Sails of Scampia, to the belvedere of the city.

To accompany Ferrara on this trip is the producer and former prisoner Gaetano Di Vaio, who has a deep knowledge of the evils and virtues of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. However you look at it, what comes out is the city split in two. Split by Spaccanapoli, split by plebs and bourgeoisie, by the old town and the hilly Naples, the bitterness and fatalism, degradation and avant-garde, the cultural ferment and the Camorra connivance, anxiety of justice and development and the scarce presence of the institutions. A city that looks like paradise, but that opens up to the mouth of hell.

 

Napoli, Napoli, Napoli
director ABEL FERRARA
year 2009
director of photography ALESSANDRO ABATE
cast LUCA LIONELLO, LUIGI MARIA BURRUANO, GIOVANNI CAPALBO, ANITA PALLEMBERG and PEPPE LANZETTA

 
 

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