Films Set in Naples

Naples is not a city; it is a body. A complex organism that breathes, bleeds, and reinvents itself before the camera. Always both muse and character, this two-faced metropolis, like the god Janus, shows one lovely and one ferocious face, capable of holding both the most heart-wrenching beauty and the most unspeakable horror in the same frame. It is a city of “luce e home” (light and shadow), a purgatory of blurred boundaries where the sacred and the profane dance an uninterrupted waltz through the alleys.

There are the great masterpieces that have used this city for immortal stories—and you will find them here. But it is precisely this contradictory soul, “sad and frivolous, determined and listless,” that makes it the most fertile ground for a cinema that refuses shortcuts. It is a cinema that is not afraid to get its hands dirty, that gets lost in the city’s belly not to tell its story, but to let the city tell its own.

This is not a simple list, but a map for navigating the most visceral Neapolitan cinema. It is a path that unites the fundamental pillars, from the most famous films to the most underground auteur cinema. Works that, from the 1990s to today, have captured the essence of a city that has been, and always will be, “alive and alone. Like Naples.”

Vito and the Others (1991)

On New Year’s Eve, twelve-year-old Vito’s father, in a fit of madness, slaughters his family, sparing only him. Entrusted to an indifferent aunt, Vito begins an unstoppable descent into the world of street crime, amidst theft, prostitution, and violence, until he becomes a child killer.

Antonio Capuano’s debut feature is not a film; it’s a detonation. Considered the birth of the “new wave” of Neapolitan cinema, Vito and the Others abandons all sociological pity to hurl the viewer into a raw, almost mythological reality. With a fragmented, anti-naturalistic style and a cast of street kids of astonishing naturalness, Capuano doesn’t just tell a story of marginalization: he makes it explode on screen, delivering an unfiltered image of the city, an urban hell where innocence is an unsustainable luxury.

Libera (1993)

Structured in three episodes, the film tells the stories of three unconventional Neapolitan women. Aurora, the bored wife of a rich man, finds herself confronting her past. Carmela faces neighborhood scandal when it’s discovered that her son’s father is a transsexual. Libera, a betrayed newsstand owner, turns her marital revenge into a red-light business.

Pappi Corsicato’s debut is an injection of pop, surreal, and queer aesthetics into the heart of a chaotic and baroque Naples. Light-years away from grim realism, Corsicato paints a gaudy, almost Almodóvarian fresco where the city becomes an open-air stage. Libera explores gender identity, sexuality, and performance as survival strategies, showing a Naples that fights its battles not with violence, but with irony, excess, and a theatrical, indomitable will to live.

The Black Holes (1995)

Adamo, an eccentric young man, returns to his hometown and falls in love with Angela, a prostitute. Their relationship intertwines with surreal and inexplicable events, including the appearance of a giant egg on a hill after Adamo unintentionally causes a boy’s death.

With The Black Holes, Pappi Corsicato pushes his cinema towards an even more radical and visionary abstraction. The title itself is a powerful metaphor: the “black holes” are the existential voids of his characters, but also the gravitational rifts from which the unexpected can emerge. Naples here is not a city, but a metaphysical landscape, a territory both putrid and magical, where the grotesque and the sublime merge. It is a bold work that uses the fantastic to explore the loneliness and latent desire on the fringes of society.

Troubling Love (1995)

Delia, an illustrator living in Bologna, returns to her native Naples for the funeral of her mother, Amalia, who died under mysterious circumstances. The investigation into her death forces Delia to confront a repressed past of family violence, secrets, and unspeakable desires, in a painful journey through the labyrinths of her memory and the city.

Based on the debut novel by a then-unknown Elena Ferrante, Mario Martone’s film is a psychological thriller of rare intensity. Naples is not a backdrop, but a labyrinth of the mind, a physical projection of the protagonist’s trauma. The alleys, the buildings, the sounds of the city become elements of a mnemonic puzzle that Delia must reassemble. Martone translates Ferrante’s dense and feverish prose into an almost tactile cinematic experience, where every place evokes a memory, every face hides a buried truth.

Pianese Nunzio, 14 in May (1996)

In the Rione Sanità, the young and charismatic Don Lorenzo fights the Camorra from the pulpit, becoming a role model for the neighborhood’s youth. Among them is Nunzio, a talented fourteen-year-old to whom the priest becomes attached with an affection that blossoms into a forbidden passion. The underworld will use this bond to discredit and destroy the priest.

Antonio Capuano returns to explore the darkest and most uncomfortable territories of the human soul. Pianese Nunzio is a courageous and frontal film, tackling taboo subjects like pedophilia in the clergy and the collusion between the Church and organized crime without moralizing. Capuano’s style is direct, at times brutal, forcing the viewer to question the ambiguous nature of power, desire, and faith in a context where the lines between good and evil are tragically blurred. A cult film shot in Naples that still shocks and questions today.

The 2000s: Auteurs, Documentaries, and New Territories

The new millennium saw the consolidation of the careers of the masters of the ’90s and the emergence of new voices, like that of Paolo Sorrentino. Neapolitan cinema opened up to international influences while simultaneously rediscovering the documentary as a tool to investigate its own complex identity.

One Man Up (2001)

Naples, 1980s. The parallel lives of two men with the same name, Antonio Pisapia. One is a successful singer, a cocaine addict and womanizer at the height of his fame. The other is an honest and introverted footballer whose career is cut short by an injury. Both will experience a ruinous fall, facing failure and loneliness.

Paolo Sorrentino’s directorial debut already contains in embryonic form all the themes and obsessions of his future cinema. Inspired by the real-life figures of Franco Califano and Agostino Di Bartolomei, the film is a melancholic and grotesque tale about success, defeat, and the impossibility of reinventing oneself. Sorrentino’s Naples is already a stylized, almost abstract city, an existential stage where his tragic and ridiculous characters enact the drama of their inadequacy in the world.

The Rest of Nothing (2004)

The film retraces the life of Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca, a noblewoman of Portuguese origin, poet, and intellectual who became one of the leading figures of the brief and tragic experience of the Neapolitan Republic of 1799. From the splendors of the Bourbon court to revolutionary passion, up to her death sentence.

Based on the novel of the same name by Enzo Striano, Antonietta De Lillo’s film is a rigorous and passionate historical work, a powerful portrait of a woman who sacrificed everything for an ideal of freedom. Far from the magniloquence of costume cinema, De Lillo chooses an almost documentary-like style, mixing period reconstruction with animation inserts. It is the story of a shattered dream, that of a Naples that for a moment imagined a different future, but also the celebration of a female figure of extraordinary modernity.

Crossing the Line (2007)

A journey aboard the long-distance express trains that cross Italy from north to south at night. The documentary captures the faces, stories, and silences of a diverse humanity of commuters, workers, and travelers, observing a country in motion but often indifferent to the lives that traverse it.

Before establishing himself as one of the most important authors of contemporary Italian cinema, Pietro Marcello created this dazzling documentary. Crossing the Line is a work of pure cinema, a visual poem that transforms the train journey into a metaphor for the human condition. Naples is not just a stop, but one of the pulsating hearts of this venous network that holds the country together. Marcello’s gaze is lyrical and profoundly human, capable of capturing the hidden beauty in daily gestures and the loneliness that inhabits transit spaces.

Napoli, Napoli, Napoli (2009)

A portrait of the city that mixes documentary and fiction. The film alternates interviews with female inmates in the Pozzuoli prison, who tell their life and crime stories, with three fictional episodes written by local authors, which stage different aspects of Neapolitan reality, from violence to the search for an escape route.

The great American director Abel Ferrara, always fascinated by border-cities and marginal figures, immerses himself in the belly of Naples with his raw and direct style. Napoli, Napoli, Napoli is a hybrid and uneven work, but powerful in its ability to capture the desperate and vital energy of the city. Ferrara does not judge, but observes, giving a voice to the voiceless and showing a metropolis where the line between legality and illegality, between victim and perpetrator, is constantly renegotiated.

The Contemporary Wave: Living in the Shadow of Gomorrah and Beyond

The global impact of Gomorrah (both the book, Garrone’s film, and the series) created a new paradigm. The independent Neapolitan cinema of the last fifteen years has had to contend with this powerful image, reacting in two opposite ways: on one hand, by deepening the narrative of criminal reality with a new, ruthless realism; on the other, by seeking escape routes through comedy, pop, and fantasy to reclaim a different imaginary.

Là-bas: A Criminal Education (2011)

Yssouf, a young African immigrant, arrives in Castel Volturno, on the coast north of Naples, to join his uncle Moses. He soon discovers that the only way to make money and survive in that no-man’s-land is to get into the drug dealing business run by his uncle. His “criminal education” will intertwine with the bloody feud between local and African clans.

Inspired by the San Gennaro massacre of 2008, Guido Lombardi’s debut is a punch to the gut. Là-bas shows an “other” Naples, decentralized, that of the Caserta province which has become one of the largest African enclaves in Europe. Shot with non-professional actors and an almost documentary-like realism, the film is a powerful and desperate noir that portrays crime as the only, tragic form of integration possible for those living on the margins of the margins. A necessary work that has unveiled a reality long ignored by cinema.

The Art of Happiness (2013)

Sergio, a disillusioned taxi driver and musician, drives through an apocalyptic Naples, submerged by rain and garbage. The news of the death of his brother, who left years earlier to become a Buddhist monk in Tibet, forces him to confront his past. Through encounters with his passengers, Sergio embarks on an inner journey in search of a new meaning for his life.

Alessandro Rak’s first animated feature film is a work of extraordinary visual and philosophical power. Far from any cliché, The Art of Happiness uses animation to create a transfigured, almost dreamlike Naples, a mirror of its protagonist’s tormented soul. It is an existential film, dense with reflections on life, death, and the possibility of finding balance in the chaos of the modern world. A masterpiece that has revealed to the world the talent of a new school of Neapolitan animation.

Perez. (2014)

Demetrio Perez is a mediocre and frightened public defender who has chosen a low-profile life to avoid trouble. When his daughter Tea falls in love with the son of a dangerous Camorra boss, Perez is forced to come out of his shell and break every rule, making a pact with a criminal to save the girl.

Edoardo De Angelis sets his noir in an unseen and spectral Naples: the Centro Direzionale, with its glass and concrete skyscrapers, becomes a modernist labyrinth that reflects the protagonist’s existential prison. Perez. is a tense and dark film, a tale of a common man’s descent into hell, magnificently played by Luca Zingaretti. The city, stripped of its classic iconography, appears as a cold and alienating place, a perfect soulscape for a drama about fear and redemption.

Bagnoli Jungle (2015)

The film follows the lives of three generations that intersect among the ruins of the former Italsider steel plant in Bagnoli: Giggino, a fifty-year-old who lives by his wits; his father Antonio, an elderly pensioner nostalgic for the working-class past; and Marco, a young deli boy looking for a future.

Antonio Capuano returns to portray the Neapolitan periphery with his unmistakable style, both raw and poetic. Bagnoli Jungle is a film about the end of an era, the industrial one, and the void it has left behind. The imposing skeleton of the steel plant becomes the symbol of a failed progress, a post-industrial “jungle” where the characters move like survivors. It is a cinema that mixes realism, dreamlike moments, and a deep humanity in portraying a forgotten piece of the city, suspended between a glorious past and an uncertain present.

Indivisible (2016)

Daisy and Viola are conjoined twins, joined at the hip, gifted with beautiful voices. Exploited by their father who makes them perform at weddings and parties like a freak show, they dream of a normal life. When a doctor reveals they can be surgically separated, their desire for individuality clashes with their family’s interests.

Set on the degraded Domitian coast, Indivisible by Edoardo De Angelis is a powerful and moving dark fairy tale. The film mixes a raw realism, showing a territory devastated by crime and illegal construction, with elements of magical realism. The physical condition of the two protagonists becomes a potent metaphor for a family bond that can be both a refuge and a prison. An original and poignant work, enhanced by the music of Enzo Avitabile and the extraordinary performance of the Fontana sisters.

Cinderella the Cat (2017)

In a futuristic and decadent Naples, young Cinderella lives as a servant aboard the Megaride, a huge technological ship-hub docked in the port. The ship is now in the hands of her wicked stepmother and the boss Salvatore Lo Giusto, known as ‘O Re, who wants to turn it into the world’s recycling center. Cinderella, mute from the trauma of her father’s death, must find the strength to rebel and seek revenge.

The collective of animators led by Alessandro Rak delivers another masterpiece, a dark and cyberpunk reinterpretation of Giambattista Basile’s fairy tale. Cinderella the Cat is a visually stunning work, combining 3D and 2D animation to create a dystopian Naples that is both fascinating and spectral. The film is an adult, violent, and melancholic noir that uses the fairy tale to tell a story of rebirth and redemption in a city that, like its protagonist, struggles to free itself from the ghosts of the past.

The Intruder (2017)

Giovanna passionately runs a recreational center for children in a tough neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, an oasis of legality and hope. The center’s balance is disrupted when Giovanna decides to shelter Maria, the young wife of a wanted Camorra member, and her two children. Her presence becomes a source of conflict, forcing everyone to confront their own prejudices.

Leonardo Di Costanzo directs a film of extraordinary psychological finesse, a moral drama that explores the boundaries between acceptance and fear, between solidarity and self-preservation. With an almost documentary-like style, dry and devoid of rhetoric, The Intruder asks complex questions without offering easy answers. The Naples of the film is a social microcosm where the daily struggle for an alternative to violence clashes with the inescapable reality of its presence.

Born in Casal di Principe (2017)

Based on a true story, the film recounts the desperate search of Amedeo Letizia, a young actor at the beginning of his career in Rome, who returns to Casal di Principe in 1989 when his brother Paolo is kidnapped. For a week, Amedeo immerses himself in the nightmare of his homeland, confronting the code of silence, violence, and impotence in the face of the Camorra’s power.

Bruno Oliviero directs a film that tells the other side of Gomorrah: that of the victims, of ordinary people overwhelmed by senseless violence. Born in Casal di Principe is a sorrowful and tense work, rigorously reconstructing a personal tragedy against the backdrop of one of the darkest pages in Campania’s history. It is a tale of powerlessness and pain, showing the criminal reality not as an epic, but as a blind force that destroys bonds and shatters lives.

Poison (2017)

Cosimo is a farmer and buffalo breeder who lives and works in the “Land of Fires.” When he discovers he has cancer, caused by toxic waste illegally dumped in his fields, he begins a desperate battle against the Camorra, which wants to force him to sell his land, and against the disease that is consuming him.

Diego Olivares brings one of the most serious environmental and social dramas of our time to the screen. Poison is a film of civil protest, a tale of resistance and dignity in the face of an invisible and omnipotent enemy. Far from the spectacularization of violence, the film focuses on the human drama of a family and a community poisoned in body and soul. It is a necessary cinema that uses the power of storytelling to shine a spotlight on a still-open wound.

Achille Tarallo (2018)

Achille Tarallo is a bus driver with a dream of becoming a singer like his idol, Fred Bongusto. Together with his friend Cafè, he performs at weddings with a “tamarro-italiano” repertoire, hoping for a life-changing opportunity. An unexpected chance will lead him to reconsider his ambitions and his relationship with reality.

At almost eighty years old, Antonio Capuano surprises everyone by directing a pop, light, and colorful comedy. Achille Tarallo is an anomalous and free work, abandoning the dark and dramatic tones of much of his cinema to embrace the comic and the surreal. It is an affectionate and ironic portrait of a dreamy and somewhat ramshackle humanity that finds in music an escape from a mediocre daily life. A film that demonstrates the extraordinary vitality of a master of Neapolitan auteur cinema.

Piranhas (2019)

Naples. A group of fifteen-year-olds from the Rione Sanità, led by the charismatic Nicola, decides to abandon retail drug dealing to aim higher. With the recklessness and arrogance of their age, they arm themselves and launch an assault to conquer the neighborhood, dreaming of money, power, and respect, without understanding the price they will have to pay.

Based on the novel of the same name by Roberto Saviano, Claudio Giovannesi’s film is a coming-of-age crime story of impressive realism. Shot with a cast of extraordinary newcomers, Piranhas documents the rise and fall of a generation that burns its adolescence on the altar of ephemeral power. Giovannesi’s gaze is immersive, almost anthropological, and shows violence not as a spectacular act, but as the tragic and inevitable language of boys who have been offered no alternative.

Rose Stone Star (2020)

Carmela is a young single mother living in Portici, struggling to make ends meet with precarious jobs and small schemes. Her relationship with her eleven-year-old daughter, Maria, is tense and conflict-ridden. To obtain a residence permit for an Algerian immigrant, she embarks on an illegal deal that will risk the fragile balance of her life.

Marcello Sannino, an acclaimed documentarian, makes his fiction debut with an intense and realistic female portrait. Rose Stone Star (the title is a line from a famous song by Sergio Bruni) is a film about precariousness, not just economic but above all emotional. Far from any stereotype of the “Neapolitan mamma,” the film sensitively portrays a woman’s struggle to be a mother in a context that offers her no support, showing a peripheral and little-told Naples.

The Hole in the Head (2020)

Maria lives a suspended life in the province of Naples, marked by a trauma she never directly experienced: her father, a policeman, was killed in Milan during a far-left demonstration in 1977, before she was born. When she discovers that the killer has served his sentence and is a free man, she decides to go to Milan to meet him.

The unmistakable Antonio Capuano directs a powerful work that connects the political violence of the Years of Lead with the endemic and social violence of contemporary Naples. The Hole in the Head is a woman’s journey in search of an origin and, perhaps, an impossible forgiveness. Through the extraordinary performance of Teresa Saponangelo, the film explores the weight of inherited hatred and the possibility of reconciliation, drawing a red thread of pain and hope that unites two eras and two cities.

Illegal Ride (2023)

Checco is an illegal taxi driver who works day and night, growing increasingly distant from his family. To make extra money, he starts collaborating with a drug dealer, ending up in a vortex of shady deals and drug use. An encounter with a young client, Viola, becomes an obsession for him, the illusion of an escape from his life.

Winner of the Naples Film Festival, Andrea Bifulco’s debut feature is a metropolitan noir that delves into the psyche of its protagonist. The Naples in the film is livid, nocturnal, and almost unrecognizable, a mental landscape that reflects Checco’s descent into loneliness and paranoia. Illegal Ride is a hallucinatory journey into the underbelly of the city and the soul, a low-budget film that demonstrates the vitality of a contemporary Naples cinema capable of exploring genre with a personal and visionary gaze.

Matteo Garrone’s Realist and Grotesque Eye

Matteo Garrone, despite not being Neapolitan by birth, has interpreted the city and its surroundings with a unique gaze, capable of moving from the crudest noir to grotesque fable. His films set in Campania have become landmarks, redefining the region’s global imagery.

The Embalmer (2002)

Peppino, a taxidermist suffering from dwarfism with ties to the underworld, develops an ambiguous and obsessive relationship with Valerio, a charming young man he hires as an assistant. The perverse balance between the two is shattered when Valerio falls in love with Deborah, sparking Peppino’s jealousy and bringing the situation to a tragic end. Inspired by a true crime story, The Embalmer is a noir of the soul, a work of sinister and haunting beauty. Garrone sets the story in a desolate suburb, between the Caserta coast and the small villages of the hinterland, transforming the landscape into a mirror for the lost souls of his protagonists. It is a film about the pain of living, loneliness, and the desperate search for a love capable of normalizing marginalized existences. Garrone’s Naples here is a ghostly non-place, a land of fog and outcast souls where a love triangle as morbid as it is tragic unfolds.

Gomorrah (2008)

Based on Roberto Saviano’s bestseller, the film interweaves five stories to tell the story of the power, money, and blood of the Camorra “System.” The lives of a tailor, an accountant, a graduate toxic waste disposal expert, and two young criminals collide with the daily violence and ruthless rules of the clan that controls the provinces of Naples and Caserta.

With Gomorrah, Garrone makes a film not about the Camorra, but inside the Camorra. Abandoning all mythologizing, he adopts an almost documentary style, raw and merciless, that immerses the viewer in a criminal ecosystem. Naples and its suburbs, like Scampia, are not a backdrop, but a sick organism, a war zone where violence is the language and illegality is the norm. The film forever changed the global perception of the city, showing crime not as a saga of bosses, but as a sprawling enterprise that poisons the earth and souls.

Reality (2012)

Luciano, a friendly Neapolitan fishmonger, encouraged by his family, attends the auditions for “Big Brother.” From that moment, the wait for a call from the production turns into an obsession. Luciano becomes convinced he is constantly being watched and judged, losing touch with reality in a vortex of paranoia and madness.

After the brutality of Gomorrah, Garrone returns to Naples to shoot a bitter tale, a black comedy about being and appearing. Inspired by a true story, the film transforms the city into a grotesque stage where the dream of television fame becomes a collective hallucination. The Naples of Reality is a place where the difference between reality and representation vanishes, a sort of modern Pinocchio where Toyland is a television studio and fame is the only, illusory, path to salvation.