A Breath of Life

In a neighborhood on the outskirts of Rome the crime, drugs and graffiti are pervasive. A large apartment complex seems to be a prison for the inhabitants. Marco returns to the hood after serving time in prison for dealing drugs but he's rejected and abandoned by his wife. His old friends still want him to deal cocaine for them. At first he's reluctant but it seems to be all he knows to do. Faustino, Massimo and Federico are delinquents who hang out together while doing drugs, petty crime, and looking for sex. Sonia is different from the rest because she studies and works all the time but even Sonia won't escape without being a victim. A tragic incident brings the main characters together and leaves behind a trail of fire, blood and violence.

The lives of the tenants of a lower-class apartment building in the outskirts intersect on a backdrop of crime, drug dealing, confused feelings and tainted relationships, in a lucid portrait of contemporary Rome. Marcello, a bisexual former body builder married with Chiara, has an affair with the bourgeois professor Walter; the ambitious Mauro and cold-blooded dealer and his wife Simona get involved in the ambiguous business of the local boss Carmine to move up to the elegant and cruel circles of central Rome that profit from the public funds for the disadvantaged; Valeria and her son Attilio, Flaminia and her violent husband Bruno face the daily difficulties of their troubled lives. The corrupted powers of urban speculation invade a suspended corner of the suburbs, contaminating the lives of a group of lost souls,revealing the desperate world of the slum and the pitiless scene of the city center as the hidden face of the same coin.