Gaetano Di Vaio

Four stories about football.

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Salvo was five when his father Vincenzo was arrested, practically before his eyes. Seven years later Salvo lives with his uncles and his cousin a controlled and peaceful existence in the Turin area, but his father returns and claims his son for four days. Vincenzo has to carry an important load to Bari and brings Salvo (nomen est omen) with him as insurance: a child is better than a gun, he says, because his presence in the event of a possible police detention can have a distracting effect . This however is not the only reason why Vincenzo wants Salvo with him, and the "Salv-atore" child will prove to be a potential vehicle of redemption for that messed up father, but not entirely devoid of feelings and attentions.

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Enzo and Monica, after a brief moment of popularity for having participated in a reality show, decide to marry. Monica dreams a perfect marriage: everything has to be special. But special things are often the most expensive ones.

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Two brothers who own a buffalo farm near Caserta attempt to resist the pressures of local mobsters who want to turn their land into an illegal landfill.

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The Spanish Quarter in Naples is a maze of alleys, squares, Baroque churches, and the “bassi”, the poor, teeming residential area behind Via Roma, the main thoroughfare. Yet the quarter is culturally far removed from the heart of the city: it's a world of its own, in which the young people spend their days looking for something to lift them out of their condition.

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Carmine, a sewer worker for the city of Naples, finds himself working in the vault of the Bank of Naples one morning, and he gets the idea to pull off a robbery using the sewer system. To pull off the heist, he enlists the help of Gaetano, a former robber with several years in prison; the depressed Peppe "'o' Sciomen," a legend of the Spanish Quarter and also a former prisoner for robbery; the boxer Ruocco, a former professional who ended up fighting in clandestine matches; and Striano, a photographer and robber. After completing the robbery, however, Gaetano disappears without a trace with the million-dollar loot, leaving his accomplices locked in their lair, hoping to see him reappear. As time passes, strong tensions build between the four, bringing out old misunderstandings and fracturing alliances, until a new threat looms on the horizon: the powerful boss Jannone demands a share of the loot they don't yet have.

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Castel Volturno, about thirty kilometers from Naples. It is September 18, 2008. A group of Camorra members burst into a tailor's shop run by African immigrants. They fire a hundred bullets indiscriminately, killing six young black men and seriously wounding another. Yussouf, a young immigrant, decided that same evening to settle the score with his uncle Moses. The man who convinced him to come to Italy. He had promised him a future as an honest craftsman but instead turned him into the cynical manager of a million-dollar cocaine ring. Entangled in their story are another African boy, Germain, who happened to be at the scene of the massacre; his girlfriend Asetù, who sings a Miriam Makeba song in public that same evening; and Suad, a prostitute whom Yussouf dreams of rescuing from her pimps.

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Weaving together fact and fiction, this docudrama performs a portrait of the often seamy underside of the city of Naples.Ferrara traveled to Italy to interview the inmates at the Naples Pozzuoli State Prison, a high security lockup for women, and with the help of a translator he allows a number of women doing time to talk about their lives before and after they were convicted. Ferrara chose to expand the short profile of the prisoners into a feature by offering a look at life in the slums of Naples and the actions of a number of law enforcement officers and social workers struggling to improve conditions for the poor, as well as adding three short fictional segments shot of digital video gear.

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