Synopsis

Vincenza doesn't always want to return home: within those walls, there's her parents' love, but there's also a dark atmosphere, a looming threat, and the beatings that await her for having stained her sparkling white shoes. But there's a big difference between not wanting to return home and not being able to return at all: and unfortunately, that's exactly what happens when a criminal vendetta turns her life upside down. What do you do, alone in the Spanish Quarter, with social services hunting you and the precarious help of a few friends and bizarre strangers who seem to know everything about your life? What do you do when you fall in love—the heart-stopping love of adolescence—but your boyfriend is in worse trouble than you? Unfortunately, no matter how many creative answers you give to these questions, the result is almost always the same: you end up chased, hunted, and in prison. Surviving becomes increasingly difficult. But Vincenza has a secret weapon: the theater, which she encountered as a young girl and then lost, but which she desperately longs to rediscover. He knows that's his talent: wearing a mask and, when the time is right, taking it off to tell the truth. Not just about his life, but about everyone's. Biagio Manna takes us to a beautiful and cruel Naples, depicted with merciless affection. A city of dimly lit alleys and a thousand unexpected events, where you can find much more than you seek: life and representation, humanity and squalor. Vincenza Birillo, with her subtle cynicism and indomitable desire to dream, is, for better or worse, a mirror of our times, of the mirages and salvation we face.