Mario Martone brings Eduardo De Filippo’s play Il Sindaco del Rione Sanità to the big screen, a story the director sets in the present day, using the text as an opportunity to continue to investigate reality.
The protagonist, Antonio Barracano, is a “man of honour” who distinguishes between “decent people and scoundrels”; around him flourishes a fierce, ambiguous and pained humanity, where good and evil confront each other in every character, where the two cities people always speak about in Naples (the legal and the criminal) clash in an encounter neither can win.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
Eduardo De Filippo’s Mayor, Antonio Barracano, is seventy-five years old, mine is half that. Such a marked shift in the age of the protagonist allows Eduardo’s great script to be put to the test of the contemporary world (nowadays the bosses of the Camorra are very young) and read from a new perspective.
Don’t expect the illusions of the old Barracano, born in the nineteenth century, which still allowed him to mark out moral boundaries: here what emerges is a ferocious, ambiguous and sorrowful humanity, in which good and evil confront one another in every character and the two cities of which people have always spoken in Naples (the law-abiding and the criminal) take each other on in a surprising match.