Italian-American filmmaker Jonas Carpignano has shown, in only his second feature, to be one of the most empathetic social realist filmmakers working today. As the most internationally renowned Italian filmmakers currently working (most notably Paolo Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone) have taken inspiration from Federico Fellini’s most extravagant and surreal efforts throughout their work, few contemporary directors are paying direct influence to the country’s mid 20th century film movement that directly preceded Fellini’s run of orgiastic efforts: neorealism.
21st Century Neorealism
Carpignano may have spent large portions of his life in New York, yet the cultures and social struggles he has depicted across two features and a handful of earlier shorts feel researched to the point of feeling like verite documentaries. A Ciambra, his second film and Italy’s submission for the foreign language Oscar last year, feels worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and the neorealist films from across the continent it inspired – most notably The 400 Blows, with which this shares many similarities, despite the stark differences in the living situations of the young protagonists.
Although an outsider to this world, due to the research put into the screenplay, and empathy afforded to the characters (even while making criminal decisions), Carpignano‘s authorial distance from the Romani community doesn’t create an emotional barrier.
Viewed solely on a storytelling level, there’s nothing within A Ciambra’s depiction of a 14-year-old falling into a life of crime that feels unfamiliar. Instead, it’s the non-judgemental depiction of a family who rely on a criminal lifestyle to keep a roof over their head that makes it unique; a community who are the scourge of numerous tabloid articles being depicted with flaws intact, yet are still fully deserving of empathy. Nobody asked for this life, and yet as Pio (Pio Amato) comes of age following in his older brother’s footsteps, he finds himself destined to repeat the same mistakes due to a lack of education or alternative escape route from this poverty stricken area.
Pio idolises his older brother Cosimo (Damiano Amato), and often sneaks out against Cosimo’s orders to see him commit petty car thefts. When a theft at a housing estate goes wrong, Cosimo is imprisoned and can no longer provide money for the family – leaving Pio to c*ckily assume the role as the breadwinner, using the tricks of the trade he’s picked up to steal cars, luggage from trains, and the possessions of the wealthy, then selling them back for extortionate amounts of money.
His youthful naivety leaves him getting too big for his boots with more ambitious criminal plans that further disconnect him from his extensive family, who vocally disapprove of the lifestyle they rely on to financially get by.
The central difference between Carpignano’s film and its neorealist forefathers is that the Italy depicted within is fundamentally different to that depicted in the film’s obvious influences. The film initially evokes a timelessness, as Pio’s surroundings appear divorced from the rest of Italian society, before diegetic EDM music and the sight of a smartphone getting thrown into a bonfire place the film directly in the here and now.
On a purely thematic level, nothing makes the film feel more contemporary than its examination of different generations of immigrants, and their varying attempts to assimilate themselves into a society they are almost entirely divorced from (few speaking roles are afforded to characters from non-Romani or non-African backgrounds, which only highlights this divide).
A Social Realist Cinematic Universe?
Pio is on friendly terms with various members of an immigrant community from Ghana, most notably Ayiva – played by Koudous Seihon, here reprising the role he played in Carpignano’s previous film Mediterranea, which featured Pio Amato playing a fictionalised version of himself in a smaller role. To put it in more clickbaity terms, Carpignano has essentially created a social realist cinematic universe in the space of two films, documenting the lives of two people from different immigrant communities who regularly intersect despite the differences in their backgrounds.
The director’s previous film dealt with the immigrant experience head-on, documenting the hostility many face when arriving in a different country for the first time. A Ciambra takes place in the aftermath of those initial months; when the hostility has faded away, but is lingering in the foreground enough to know it’s still difficult to assimilate and make a better life for yourself.
In his recent review of Disobedience, Film Inquiry’s Shawn Glinis argued that director Sebastian Lelio was a purveyor of “interloper cinema” – a filmmaker who would go out of his way to avoid telling stories with an autobiographical element, in order to focus on communities he was alien to, with varying results. Carpignano could theoretically be accused of the same, but there’s one notable difference. Like Francois Truffaut and the character of Antoine Doinel, Carpignano has already spent years returning to these real-life characters via short films; his 2012 short A Chjàna introduced Ayiva in the wake of a violent race riot, while 2014’s Young Lyons of Gypsy introduced us to Pio, giving us a day in his life.
He may have been an “interloper” at first, but Carpignano has returned to these non-professional actors to tell lightly fictionalised versions of their stories for years. Those watching A Ciambra with no prior knowledge of his work needn’t worry about the lack of character context, but the rich (albeit lowkey) story he tells here feels like the culmination of everything he’s been working towards as a filmmaker. If it feels effortlessly empathetic, that’s because he knows these characters like the back of his hand – and will stay on their side through thick and thin.
A Ciambra: Conclusion
Even without the context that establishes these characters, A Ciambra is a truly wonderful piece of social realist storytelling. Roger Ebert’s oft-repeated quote that cinema was an “empathy machine” designed to put us in the shoes of those we could never possibly relate feels like it was tailor made to suit Jonas Carpignano’s approach to the character study.
These are people who don’t live within the confines of society, and the things they have to do to get by are acts of criminality with which we would usually reserve judgement – but when they’re as rounded, empathetic and naturally ingrained within a rich, yet unspoken, socio-political context as they are in A Ciambra, you can’t help but root for them anyway. It’s The 400 Blows for a new generation, with a renewed political urgency that feels vital in the current climate.
A Ciambra is released in the UK on June 15. It was released in the US back in January, and is now available on home media.
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