Abel Ferrara went to an Italian women's prison and made something way messier than you'd expect.
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.
Direction
Ferrara's handheld panic colliding with prisoner testimonies.
Writing
The fictional ruptures that question what documentary even owes us.
Director
Abel Ferrara
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Ferrara shot this between 'Mulberry St' and '4:44 Last Day on Earth' during his European exile years, using actual Pozzuoli inmates who'd never acted before.
The 'sceneggiata' musical tradition of Naples haunts the fictional segments—Ferrara importing his own city's melodrama onto ancient working-class Italian performance forms.
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