Scampia, Naples.
The evening of the 22th of July 2024 marks the beginning of the end. The end of an era. Three people die following the collapse of a balcony inside the Vela Celeste. A tragedy that, overnight, led to the forced eviction of hundreds of families living in the last remaining Vele buildings. This is the story of the Veliani, as the inhabitants of those concrete monsters that have become famous throughout the world proudly call themselves. The ordeal of a “people” who have lived through “a season in hell”, as the poet Arthur Rimbaud would say. A journey that began in late 1980 when, after the earthquake of the 23th of November that left 3,000 dead and 200,000 displaced in Campania, thousands of families came to occupy the houses still under construction on the northern outskirts of Naples, including those strange buildings whose shape resembled the sail of a boat. Thousands of people have lived in the Vele over the past forty years. Generations have grown up between plasterboard and asbestos walls, sewage and piles of rubbish, in environments where not even the sun could penetrate. And today, after being abandoned to their fate, they have been forced to leave their homes without any guarantees. Thus began the frantic search for accommodation that led to the disintegration of an entire community, people who, from one day to the next, lost everything. A Via Crucis that took them from the hell of the Vele to temporary homes, a purgatory in which to atone for their sins before being admitted to new homes, the much-coveted paradise that the municipality should deliver to them within a few years. The documentary tells the story of this odyssey. In addition to the memories, fears and hopes of the inhabitants of the Vele, there are the voices of the neighbourhood: the priest of the Vele, Alessandro Gargiulo, the teacher, Elvira Quagliarella, the president of the Eighth Municipality of Naples, Nicola Nardella. Writers Maurizio de Giovanni and Valeria Parrella, singer Franco Ricciardi and 'A67, a band named after the neighbourhood. Street artist Trisha Palma, former head of the Scampia police station Michele Spina. Historian Marcello Ravveduto, photographer Mario Spada, actress Cristina Donadio, Mitzi Di Salvo, daughter of architect Franz Di Salvo, the Real Vele footballers and Mirella La Magna from the GRIDAS association.
A story that also traces the history of Le Vele and the neighbourhood up to the Camorra feud of 2004-2005 between the Di Lauro clan and the so-called scissionisti, and the ensuing criminal narrative that swept through the neighbourhood and made it known throughout the world, entering the collective imagination as a topos of evil.