In Naples, time does't exist. This is a popular belief, a superstition, a good luck charm, a trick, a song. In Naples,you spend your time waiting, and then, all of a sudden, you spend it just remembering. So will the beautiful things arrive? Or have they already happened? We compare four lives in a Naples of 1999 - full of hope, and then today, in a totally paralyzed Naples.
"Four Neapolitan youngsters give an insight into the burden of becoming adults: Fabio and Enzo, two twelve year-old boys, still children… And Adele and Silvana, two little women of fourteen… Four gazes full of beauty, sadness, ingenuity, fragility, fear, hope and cynicism. But above all - radiant with that special light, still vivid at that age, as entities still able to dream the beautiful things. But already then, in 1999, when we were filming Intervista a mia madre, a documentary on fragmented adolescents in Naples, our four protagonists were flaunting signs of disenchantment: because catastrophes are always round the corner in their city. It's a threat, if not an alibi, that makes Neapolitan's lives remain immoveable, and yet they were aware of this condition due to their instinct and their education. Ten years and ten mayors later, passing trough a cultural revival that attracted artists from all over the world, trough Gomorra depicted by Saviano, we came back filming them, following our protagonists during an arch of three years: and in 2012, our folks do not believe in beautiful things anymore: maybe they had already shipped by. Or maybe the beautiful things are not to be looked for nor in the future nor in the past, but in that particular present lived with the heart breaking beauty of waiting, of uncertain living day by day, of the struggling for a decent existence: swimming sometimes against the current and sometimes letting oneself go." (Agostino Ferrente and Giovanni Piperno)