Gomorrah

Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (Gomorra) won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2008, Garrone's largest international prize at that point and the moment that consolidated him alongside Paolo Sorrentino as one of the major Italian auteurs of his generation. Adapted from Roberto Saviano's 2006 non-fiction book of the same name (Saviano had been living under continuous police protection since the book's publication, a protection that has continued to the present day) the film became one of the most internationally consequential pieces of Italian cinema of the 2000s.

The film tells five interlocking stories of people caught in the gears of the Camorra criminal network operating in the Naples region, a thirteen-year-old boy entering the local clan, a couture-tailor working for the Asian-export branch of the criminal economy, a haulage-and-waste contractor moving toxic waste through Campania farmland, a restaurant interior-decorator dependent on the Camorra-controlled supply chain, and a small-time foot-soldier in the Casalesi clan war. The cast is largely non-professional, with the major exception of Toni Servillo (one of two professional actors in major roles) and a number of Casal di Principe and Scampia residents playing themselves.

Marco Onorato's photography of the Scampia Vele social-housing blocks, the actual Casal di Principe industrial-agricultural geography, and the Vesuvian-coast tailoring workshops produced a sustained register of regional-Italian-realism that has been continuously cited in subsequent Italian and Spanish cinema. The film's reception in Naples and Caserta was complicated; the Camorra clans depicted continued operations more or less unchanged.