Up to Down

Naples. City of the unbowed, but also of madmen and paupers, which refuses to lick anyone’s boots, let alone stoop to pretense. This depressing documentary bad trip takes us on a tour of the city’s dismal eastern suburbs, where poverty manifests itself in environmental brutality: gaping, plaster-deprived buildings, neglected interior courtyards, concrete bleak and ubiquitous. Here we find the homes of the marginalized and rejected: a man, a girl, and a masked boxer – three protagonists yearning for something else, although they’re not quite sure what. Not even echoes of a happier past, remembered in faded footage from family video archives, can lessen the vastness of the social wasteland that is Naples. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)