Coriandoli

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 a middle school on the northern outskirts of Naples, a teenager roughly fifteen years old appears before the examiners to earn his diploma. The professors are as skeptical as can be expected about a student who has repeated the year more than once, but the boy isn't intimidated and delivers his oral report about history, his own personal history, marred by a tragedy, and then moves on to discuss the human body and the sculpture The Veiled Christ. The teachers hear him out in silence; a passing grade is all he asks for. The film was conceived and produced as part of a film production course at Vodisca Teatro / La Scugnizzeria held by Gianluca Arcopinto and Vincenzo Marra.

The film recounts the transformation of Scampia from a drug dealing hub to a hub for books and culture, focusing on the activities of La Scugnizzeria bookshop and the Marotta&Cafiero publishing house.