VIMooZ

DIRECTOR(S): Agostino Ferrente

STARRING: Alessandro Antonelli, Pietro Orlando

GENRE: Documentary Film

SYNOPSIS: Several years after an unarmed teenager was shot by police in the Traiano region of Naples, filmmaker Agostino Ferrente traveled to the gang-ravaged neighborhood to make a documentary about the lives of its young people—for whom the prospect of being swept up in Camorra activity perpetually looms. The film’s central subjects are Alessandro and Pietro, 16-year-old best friends whom Ferrente recruited to film themselves using smartphones in “selfie” mode as they go about their daily lives. The result is at once lyrical and raw, a deceptively offhand, richly moving chronicle of adolescent friendship in a social microcosm shaped by economic precarity, conflicting moralities, and the improbable persistence of hope.