Many neighborhoods in Naples still celebrate the ritual of the bonfires of Saint Anthony in mid January. Kids start collecting firewood after New Year’s, sometimes venturing far from home to look for it. Every group stashes their wood in a different hiding place, “the secret,” so they can protect it from being raided by other neighboring groups. Checco Lecco’s gang from the Spanish Quarters has been hiding spruces of all sizes in an abandoned site: it was cleared twenty years before when they demolished a building damaged by the 1980 earthquake. Every afternoon, the kids leave from their “secret” in small groups and head to the elegant parts of town to retrieve Christmas trees discarded after the holidays. The countdown to January 17th, the day of the bonfires, is spent between hectic searches and skirmishes, sometimes real and often imaginary, to defend their treasure from the assaults of the “enemies.”
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
In many quarters of Naples the collection of the spruces for the bonfires of Saint Anthony is a tradition, a ritual, an adventurous game that the kids pass down from generation to generation. For those who look at it from the outside, it may just appear as a sequence of acts of vandalisms and yelling till night, that ends with a dangerous fire, too close to the buildings. We wanted to tell about what happens in many streets around the city in January, from a point of view that’s the closest to the one of a bunch of kids. Following them in their hunt, their coalitions and tiffs between gangs, observing their behaviours, their language, their codes of conduct.
We were sure that all the questions that we’ve been having from a long time, and that are necessarily, about the connection between the city and the children, would have come out spontaneously.
Country: Italia
Year: 2013
Running time: 89'
Format: DCP, Blu Ray
Subtitles: Italiano
Genre: documentary
Screenplay: Luca Rossomando
Cinematography: Ciro Malatesta
Editing: Alessandra Carchedi
Music: Enzo Avitabile
With: (in ordine di apparizione) Ivano Calabria, Luigi Provenzano, Antonio D’amato, Mimmo Russo, Emanuele Criscuolo, Salvatore Di Matteo, I ragazzi della Torretta, Gennaro Picco, Salvatore Nocerino, Francesco Albinni, Ferdinando De Crescenzo, Emanuele Pio Adamo, Godwin Kofi “Emanuele” Boateng, Francesco Verrano, Rosario Pirone, Giuseppe Basile, Antony Marra, Luigi De Crescenzo, Giuseppe Civitelli, Francesco Civitelli, Mario D’ascia, I ragazzi del Cavone, Francesco Matteo, Carlo De Fortis Nadi, Tommaso Panico, Marcello Quaranta, Emanuele Abbate, Gennaro De Gaetano, Pio Patrizio Manna, Giuseppe Iannelli, Luciano Zazzera, Giuseppe Letteriello, Mimmo Egidio, Salvatore Riccardi, Amedeo Fasanella, Giovanni Iair, Matteo Ciriello, Gennaro Avoletto, Ciro Starita, Luigi Miano, Raffaele Fani, Francesco Cannola
Produced by: Quore Spinato, Parallelo 41, Napoli Monitor, Antonella Di Nocera, Daria D’Antonio
Festival: Premio Extra muros a Pravo Ljudski Film Festival, Sarajevo
Menzione speciale a DocLisboa, Lisbona
Miglior documentario e Vesuvio award al Napoli Film Festival
Premio speciale della giuria a Fronteira, Goiania, Brazil
Finalista del David di Donatello
Menzione Gianni Volpi al Bellaria Film Festival
Vincitore Terre di cinema (miglior documentario)
Vincitore Cinéma du réel (miglior opera prima)
Quartieri Spagnoli, fuoco e fiamme
Menzione speciale al 31° Torino Film Festival
Premio UCCA
True/False Film Festival, Columbia, Missouri, Usa
Press materials
