Manetti Bros. - Ammore e malavita

Naples. Ciro is a feared killer. Along with Rosario, he is one of the two “tigers” at the service of Don Vincenzo, “’o re d’o pesce” [the king of fish], and his astute wife, Donna Maria. Fatima is a dreamer, a young nurse. Two worlds that are apparently distant but fated to collide.
One night Fatima finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ciro is given the job of getting rid of the girl who has seen too much. But things don’t go as planned. The two end up face to face, recognize each other and rediscover, one in the other, the never forgotten love of their adolescence.

If a killer working for the camorra is told to bump off a woman and recognizes in her the love of his adolescence, are we talking about love or the world of crime? This is where we started out and the story came afterward, almost by itself. Songs accompany the fundamental and most emotionally powerful moments of the story: they are sung when two characters are about to kiss, but during a shootout too. The genre of the musical has allowed us to go over the top, tackling profound and important themes like love and death while maintaining a light and spectacular tone.
We are not aiming for realism, but plausibility. In order to believe in the story we are telling we like to take real characters, whom we have met in real life, and set them in the fanciful frame of an exaggerated tale.
The city of Naples has been our inspiration and the result is a personal revisiting of its most charged and popular art form, the sceneggiata or Neapolitan melodrama.
But let’s be clear, the message of the film is not: “This is what happens in Naples.” What happens, happens only in our story.
Our Naples is not just the gloomy and despairing city as it has lately been portrayed in the movies or on TV, but also a Naples that, in spite of all its problems, stimulates with its cultural ferment and inspires with its sense of humanity. Every time we go back it inevitably makes us smile.
Whatever our mood.
An incomparable power.