The experience told in Selfie — where I had lived side by side with its protagonists for a long time — had wounded me deeply. I had promised myself not to make other documentaries for a while, or at least not to dive again so completely into true stories. But I realized I had unfinished business with the kids from the Rione: not about money or guilt, but about glances, expectations, quiet disappointments, and words left hanging.
So I went back to the hours of footage saved on makeshift hard drives, where I had secretly copied everything. Those images weren’t supposed to exist anymore — the official drives used for Selfie’s editing had been emptied to make room for new shoots. Yet they had survived, suspended in a kind of limbo.
It became a journey through discarded fragments — ghostly presences that, as we say in Naples, had remained appese(“hanging”). But in documentary cinema, there are no real discards: every excluded shot is a piece of life, unique and unrepeatable, carrying its own human and narrative weight.
The Possible Lives was born from this impulse — the desire to rescue what had been left out of frame and to restore light and dignity to those kids who had trusted me. Rewatching them, and realizing I still loved them deeply, I understood they could help me see the present more clearly — and that leaving them forgotten, appese on a hard drive, would have been an unforgivable waste.

Director's statement

The experience told in Selfie — where I had lived side by side with its protagonists — had hurt me too deeply. I had promised myself not to make other documentaries for a while, or at least not to dive again into true stories. But I realized I had unfinished business with the kids from the Rione. Not about money or guilt, but about glances, expectations, and words left hanging.
So I went back to the hours of footage saved on makeshift hard drives, where I had secretly copied everything. Those images weren’t supposed to exist anymore: the official drives used for Selfie’s editing had been emptied to make room for new shoots. Yet they had survived — suspended in a kind of limbo.
It became a journey through discarded fragments: ghostly presences that, as we say in Naples, had remained appese — hanging. But in documentary cinema there are no real discards: every excluded shot is a piece of life, unique and unrepeatable, carrying its own human and narrative weight.
The Possible Lives was born from this impulse — the desire to rescue what had been left out of frame and to give back light and dignity to those kids who had trusted me. Rewatching them, and realizing I still loved them deeply, I understood they could help me read the present more clearly — and that leaving them forgotten, appesi on a hard drive, would have been an unforgivable waste.