Napoli-New York, an Untold Fellini Story
TORONTO – ICFF’s fourteenth edition of their annual Film Festival kicked off on Friday in Toronto’s Distillery District, with an open-air screening of Gabriele Salvatores’ Napoli New York. The audience was also treated to a pre-recorded interview with Salvatores and a live Q&A with one of the film’s stars, Omar Benson Miller. Both the actor and director spoke proudly about the privilege of having participated in a film that was based on a 58-page Federico Fellini treatment.
In fact, the film’s story was conceived of and cowritten by Fellini and his then writing partner Tullio Pinelli, sometime in the mid 1940s. Pinelli famously co-wrote Fellini’s La Strada, La Dolce Vita and 8 ½. During ICFF’s interview with Salvatores, the director explained that the nearly 60-page treatment (story outline) was found in Pinelli’s archives in 2006 and subsequently published. Producers Isabella Cocuzza and Arturo Paglia then acquired the adaptation rights for the Salvatores project.
Originally titled Napoli-New York, Fellini wanted to tell a voyage to America story. The war-afflicted Italians of the mid-40s, however, might have had a significantly different perception of America than today’s filmmakers. Salvatores recalled in his interview that Fellini hadn’t yet been to America when he wrote the story – and many of his descriptions of the culture read like guesswork.
Salvatores’ adaptation tells the story of two orphaned children, Carmine and Celestina, who reach America as stow-aways on a ship to New York City in 1949. Having lost their parents in a bombing, Celestina [under the stewardship of a street-smart Carmine] goes searching for her older sister who’s moved to the Big Apple.
The story revisits a difficult chapter for Italians both in Italy and abroad, and reminds the viewer that many Americans still viewed Italian immigrants as “enemy aliens” – well after US Attorney General Francis Biddle announced the removal of restrictions on its Italian nationals. “We don’t serve Italians here”, is what a starving Carmine and Celestina are told when they enter a Manhattan bakery. An all too familiar scenario which was likely experienced, to some degree, by our parents and/or grandparents.
But while newly arrived Italian immigrants were having to endure some mistreatment, the US sponsored Marshall Plan significantly helped Italy recover from its post-war devastation. When the war ended in Italy, Italian GDP per capita was 38 percent lower than the value observed in 1938. Industrial production was 66% lower, due mainly to damaged public infrastructure. And Nearly 70% of the roads and 45% of the railroad system were unusable.
Salvatores, who wooed the Oscars with his 1991 film Mediterraneo, about a group of Italian soldiers who wash up on Greek shores after Allies sink their ship, brings a similar charm to his Fellini adaptation. It’s an endearing and emotional reminder of the journey taken by Italy’s diaspora, and how the cultural exchange between the two nations helped to birth an incredible era in American and world history.
(Images courtesy of 01 Distribution)
Massimo Volpe is a filmmaker and freelance writer from Toronto: he writes reviews of Italian films/content on Netflix
