The other side of the multi-award-winning documentary Selfie by Agostino Ferrente.
From never-before-seen images, fortuitously rescued from deletion, emerges a new film by the same author: complementary to Selfie yet, strikingly, also autonomous and independent. A one-of-a-kind spin-off, born not from new shooting but from the daring and meticulous creative recovery of discarded material — powerful documentary images that return today with a new force, capable of narrating the present in a rawer, more surprising, and incisive way.
In Naples’ Rione Traiano, as in many deprived neighborhoods around the world, crime — and especially drug dealing — often appears as the only possible response to the void left by an absent educational and social system. Thus, kids as young as twelve are pushed onto no-return paths, almost inevitably. Yet, it is precisely in that “almost” that hope resides.
The film reflects on the “possible lives” of these kids and on the few opportunities they are given. If in Selfie the author told a romantic “exception” — the story of two boys who tried to resist a pre-written fate by choosing humble and honest jobs instead of bowing to crime — in The Possible Lives the gaze widens to portray the context that evokes the “rule.”
The thread remains the everyday life of Alessandro and Pietro (captured here in mostly unseen situations), but alongside them emerge other stories and characters who in Selfie remained on the margins or did not appear at all: from boys as young as 12–14 drawn toward crime — proof of how the Camorra now recruits at ever younger ages — to kids who, despite all difficulties, struggle to save themselves by seeking alternative paths.
For those who saw Selfie, The Possible Lives becomes an opportunity to rediscover its protagonists and delve deeper into their world; for those who did not, it stands on its own as a complete and autonomous work.
An ethical and aesthetic challenge to the throwaway culture of images. And, at the same time, a reflection on the very language of documentary cinema, on its possibilities and its limits.