Rione Traiano, Naples: a bedroom community trapped between organized crime and law enforcement crackdowns. One summer night in 2014, sixteen-year-old Davide Bifolco is killed by a carabiniere who mistakes him for a fugitive. To the local youths, this isn't just a news headline: he is a friend who is suddenly gone, a peer, a reflection of what could have been their own fate.

From that tragedy, Selfie is born. Director Agostino Ferrente hands two smartphones to Alessandro and Pietro—sixteen-year-olds trying to escape a pre-written destiny, one working as a bar assistant, the other an unemployed aspiring barber—asking them to film

themselves and the world around them as both subjects and camera operators. Much of this footage never made the final cut.

Ten years later, Ferrente returns to the neighborhood without shooting a single new frame. Instead, he excavates his own discarded footage, searching the margins of familiar scenes and forgotten screen tests, critically re-examining his own director's gaze.

Alessandro and Pietro remain at the core, but the frame expands to include the guaglioni who were pushed to the margins of Selfie—or omitted entirely. They are lively, restless teenagers whose desires and fears remain suspended in time, constrained by an horizon offering precious few alternatives.

The film does not reveal what became of their lives, but rather what lives they ever stood a chance of living. It is not a sequel, but a B-side: a reverse shot of memory where the discarded takes center stage, bringing back into the light the images, stories, and perspectives once destined to be erased.

A love letter to its characters, and a meditation on the limits and responsibilities of non-fiction filmmaking.

Director's note

I might as well say it right away: this film is a declaration of love to the characters of my documentary Selfie. And it stems from a simple question: what becomes of the images left out of a film? I started rewatching them out of a promise, then out of curiosity and nostalgia, thinking that by playing around with them a bit, they might become something else. Then, I simply couldn't let them go.

These notes could end right here.

On old 45 rpm records, there were two sides. On Side A was the main track—the one pushed by the record label. On Side B was the more personal track, recorded in the very same session, with the very same musicians, but free from the obligation to please. Let's say Selfie (2019) was Side A. Selfie - B- Side is the other side: it springs from what was left out

of the edit when we shot in the summer of 2017. Same protagonists, same neighborhood, same summer—a different song.

A few months after the release of Selfie, we organized a screening in Rione Traiano, in the small square in front of the home of Davide Bifolco—the boy killed by a carabiniere who mistook him for a fugitive, whose story had inspired the film. We set up a large screen and gathered hundreds of chairs from the parish church. Nearly a thousand people showed up, mostly young kids. At first, a few scooters kept revving their engines around the square; after a few minutes, almost all of them stopped, hypnotized by the images.

Among the crowd was a young boy I had auditioned. He came up to me accompanied by his parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, eager to see himself on the big screen. He didn't know that his screen test, like so many others, hadn't made the final cut.

That night, the neighborhood recognized itself on screen, and feeling their approval was a relief and a source of deep satisfaction. Yet I was left with a lingering bitterness over that boy who went home disappointed.

So, I began rewatching the footage, and those images began to demand something of me. After Selfie, I had felt the need to step away from non-fiction cinema—that experience had shaken me. But my mind kept returning to the Rione and to those kids, carrying the feeling that I had gained the most from that encounter while leaving them appesi—left hanging in the balance. In Naples, you leave people hanging when someone backs out after a promise—even an unspoken one—is broken.

In Selfie, I was particularly attached to a sort of romantic exception: the reality of two sixteen-year-olds, Alessandro and Pietro, using friendship as a shield against a fate that seemed pre-written. Now, I felt the frame needed to expand to the guaglioni who had remained on the margins of the shot or were only met during auditions, almost all of whom were excluded from Selfie.

I began excavating the raw footage, searching for what I had long called the possible lives. I could have gone back to those kids years later and asked them what they had become. I didn't: I wasn't interested in taking stock, separating those who made it from those who didn't, or stamping a final verdict on lives that are still in motion. I preferred to stay within those archival images and look not for the lives they went on to live, but for the lives they had the possibility to live back then: the desires and fears they shared with the camera, and the possibilities that their birthplace, family background, financial constraints, and opportunities—both seized and missed—opened or closed before them. Their hunger for the future, coupled with the feeling that they could do very little to shape it.