Davide Mastropaolo

A child of war, born to a Neapolitan girl and an American soldier after World War II, James Senese was raised in the outskirts of Naples, of which he witnessed the transformation from countryside to suburb. In a fifty-year-long career, he has searched for an identity in a changing world, pouring his conflicts into his music. The documentary paints a portrait of the man and the artist, tracing the beating heart of his trajectory back to the formation of the band Napoli Centrale in the early Seventies, and investigating the latest evolution of that musical endeavor.

Warehouse employee by day, Elvis impersonator by night, Sandro's performance at a nightclub makes such a big impression, that an unlikely manager offers him a tour of China. Torn between the dream of a lifetime and his emasculating Neapolitan mother, Sandro will have to face the most difficult thing for him: making a choice.

Maria, a young Neapolitan painter, lives the artistic experimentation of the 1960s. She is a woman who does not hesitate to live her life adhering to the ideals of research and love, which are for her the very content of art.

Between segregation and cosmic revelation, The Magic City traces the birth of Sun Ra, where a city becomes myth and a man, a galaxy.

Castel Volturno, about thirty kilometers from Naples. It is September 18, 2008. A group of Camorra members burst into a tailor's shop run by African immigrants. They fire a hundred bullets indiscriminately, killing six young black men and seriously wounding another. Yussouf, a young immigrant, decided that same evening to settle the score with his uncle Moses. The man who convinced him to come to Italy. He had promised him a future as an honest craftsman but instead turned him into the cynical manager of a million-dollar cocaine ring. Entangled in their story are another African boy, Germain, who happened to be at the scene of the massacre; his girlfriend Asetù, who sings a Miriam Makeba song in public that same evening; and Suad, a prostitute whom Yussouf dreams of rescuing from her pimps.

On 17 October 79 AD, the city of Pompeii was buried under lava after the sudden eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Today, the mythical site has yet to reveal all its secrets. A new excavation campaign is being conducted, the most significant in 70 years and one of the major archaeological investigations of the twenty-first century. The film unveils the sumptuous frescoes and mosaics that adorned the excavated villas and uses historical reconstructions in natural settings to show, hour by hour, how the city and its inhabitants were buried under a mantle of ash.