The Human Factor

A prison drama where an old mobster and a prison guard must find a way to coexist so that imprisonment can become less so, and perhaps reveal the paradox that is behind the very concept of captivity.

The director follows the workshop "Educarsi alla libertà" (Educating oneself to freedom) by playwright and theater director Mimmo Sorrentino in the maximum security section of the Vigevano prison. The protagonists are women convicted of crimes related to organized crime.

Elisa, the daughter of an ordinary family, has been in prison for ten years for brutally murdering her sister. She believes she doesn’t remember what happened, but her fragmented memories begin to come into focus during meetings with the criminologist Alaoui, who is conducting a study on family homicides. The truth that emerges for Elisa is devastating—a pain that may mark the beginning of redemption.

Naples. Present day. Giovanna, a combative 60-year-old social worker on the frontline of the daily war against pervasive criminality, is confronted, like a modern Antigone, with a moral dilemma that threatens to destroy her work and her life. Giovanna runs an after-school centre that takes care of underprivileged children; a grassroots alternative to the mafia dominance of the city. But one day, young Maria, wife of a ruthless Camorra criminal on the run, and her two children take refuge at the centre, and ask Giovanna for protection.

In the late 1980s, Amedeo Letizia, a young 20 something Italian, leaves his hometown of Casal di Principe to pursue a career in acting in Rome. While he's making his debut, his younger brother Paolo is kidnapped by armed men. Amedeo comes back, this return being an infernal descent into his past and his region's contradictions.

Television documentary about Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990), one of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the 20th Century.