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VENICE 2012 Venice Days

Listening and waiting: a journey inside a prison's walls with Il gemello

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- Fourth installment of an investigation into the places that define Naples - a new documentary film by the Neapolitan director is based out of Secondigliano prison

Behind bars with the detained, inside their cells. This is where the spectator is taken to in Vincenzo Marra’s latest documentary Il gemello [+see also:
trailer
interview: Vincenzo Marra
film profile
]
, presented during Venice Days. Following previous installments which looked at a stadium, Naples tribunal, and an abandoned industrial site in Bagnoli, Marra has taken his camera to penetrate behind the walls of Secondigliano prison. For one year and a half he recorded its daily happenings, its exchanges and prisoners’ most intimate thoughts. The film looks at one man in particular, 29-year-old Raffaele Costagliola, who people call ‘il gemello’, the twin. Costagliola has been locked up for twelve years for crimes tied to the camorra, the local mafia. He is no ordinary inmate: a charismatic man, who is well respected. He works in garbage collection and manages to support his family.

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Raffaele’s sole objective is to get out as soon as possible. “If I have six years left, then I would like to only have four,” he says. As a result, he lives the life of a model inmate. We follow him as he works, cleans his cell, and gets food ready. He gets on with everybody and avoids conflict. We also follow him during his interviews with inspector DomenicoManzi, nicknamed Niko, who is head of the prison guards. Niko speaks to the prisoners, tries to get to know them and helps them. Prisoners build a relationship built on trust and constructive confrontation with him. Inspector Niko suggests Raffaele should read Siddharta to help him listen and wait. Raffaele in turn tells him how his cousin was killed, because even small time drug dealers kill each other nowadays. “This film was an opportunity for me to show what we do in prisons,” underlines Manzi, “during my one on one time with prisoners, I try to get to know the person in front of me. Thanks to this act of listening, self-harm among prisoners has been reduced by 70 to 80 per cent, because prisoners no longer feel abandoned.”

Marra follows these encounters discreetly. “The camera was obvious, I am not saying I went there with a secret camera,” he explains, “but there was such a feeling of trust among us that everyone felt at ease.” A documentary filmed in the style of a fiction film. “No background narration, little music, no character sitting and speaking to the camera. I wanted to film life, but add drama to it.” And life seethes in Raffaele’s eyes: “I want to make another film,” he wrote in a message read by Marra during the presentation of the film in Venice, “remember me, I am strong and I know how to wait.” “I always wondered whether a film could change a life,” the director went on to comment, “from Raffaele’s will to speak and walk, I really feel it can.”

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(Translated from Italian)

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