Master and servant is a film about the Neapolitan subaltern classes, a close-up account of the daily efforts and aspirations of those who have no power, no money, no education, nor public voice. Although the “social question” is an ever present theme of debate in the public sphere, its deeper core, its origins, its causes, remain unspoken; they are basically invisible, unchanging, without ever becoming political issues.
Ugo was killed when he was fifteen, while trying to steal a Rolex watch with a toy gun. The watch was worn by a Carabiniere military policeman, off duty and in plain clothes, only slightly older than him. Ugo's family members, and a supporting group of activists and neighborhoods, engaged into a campaign to shed light on the circumstances of his death, and to counter the prejudices and bias of the local press against children of Naples's working class neighborhoods. They take the streets with Ugo’s many friends and peers at each anniversary of his murder; they chained themselves in protest in front of the Court to push for the start of the trial; and they traveled around Italy to explain the story of Ugo and his death. A large graffiti with the boy’s face was painted on the wall of a square not far from the family's home. The municipality of Naples and a judge, however, considered the painting illegal and sentenced it to erasure. To prevent a police intervention, members of Ugo's family finally decided to apply a coat of yellow paint on the boy’s image, once again drawing attention to his fate and to the conditions of the many boys who live in working class neighborhoods, and who are denied a proper future.
Pio is a twenty-five years old man from the Spanish Quarters. We’ve known each other since he was a bright and restless kid, and later when he turned into a histrionic teenager, passionate about rap and well integrated into his neighborhood's migrant communities. We had already filmed him for our first movie, The secret. Now that he is a young precarious worker, a cog in the wheel of mass tourism services that is quickly transforming the historic center of the city, we worked with him again. He had moved to work in a Northern Italian city, but hard work and loneliness brought him back home. For two years, he was employed in making sandwiches in a downtown pub, but he was fired when he asked the owner to provide him with a regular contract. Now he is looking for work again. His creative attitude and his desire to live still appear every now and then, but the path that awaits him seems marked in advance, as the flame of his diversity fades away, one day after another.
In the mid-1970s, when unemployment and the cholera epidemic had brought the city on its knees, unemployed Neapolitans such as artisans in crisis, laid-off workers, returning migrants, organized committees to claim the right to what they called “stable and secure” employment. The forms of struggle that developed in that period are still being revived and updated nowadays. Today, the committee of unemployed workers gathers approximately six hundred people, both men and women, and after ten years of struggle they seem on the verge of achieving their goal. The last word, however, has not been said, since this game is played inside institutions, but also on the streets of the city. Through assemblies, marches and demonstrations, the story of the movement of unemployed workers emerges from the past but gives us a glimpse of the future, a way out from exploitation, isolation, and resignation.