A considerably larger audience (perhaps the Italian contingent were all watching Inter in the Champions' League semi the previous night) gathered for another drama based on real life, Italian Golden Globe Best Director winner:

Fortapasc

Directed by Marco Risi

Fortapasc is Neapolitan slang for Fort Apache, a name ruefully applied to Torre Annunziata, a small down-at-heel town near Naples which in the 80s was from top to bottom controlled, overtly and covertly, by the Camorra, and a constant battleground in their turf wars. Into this world came Giancarlo Siani, young newspaper stringer for the Naples paper Il Mondiale, seeking stories where he could, going to lengths no cynical hard-bitten journalist would to get at the truth. With his bright green golf-buggy type motor, his glasses and his joke-stickered old typewriter, he's an almost geeky, unlikely hero, but when he gets a whiff of multiple corruption in local government, law enforcement and industry, desire for justice and being a ‘journalist journalist' as opposed to those who just write what they know is safe, inevitably leads him into danger.

Risi cannily lets us know at the very beginning what is to happen to Siani on that fateful night of 23 September, then shows in flashback how it all came to be, allowing us to form an attachment to the always doomed young man. The half smile with which he greets his murderers encapsulates his gentle and humorous nature, a great performance throughout by Libero de Rienzo, and a fitting tribute to a courageous man. While less universally chilling and monumental than Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone's poetic and unrelenting portrait of the Camorra, this film would make a fitting companion to it, tragedy on a personalised, human scale, a view of a life full of recognisable small pleasures, hopes and setbacks, and the more moving for that.

Seen at Elvet Riverside, Durham, 29 April 2010