Cinema Italia: The Vice Of Hope

Synopsis

The Vice of Hope
[Il Vizio Della Speranza]

Q&A with Federico Solchi, SBS Audio & Language Content Producer / Broadcaster + Alana Lentin, Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University.

Following his acclaimed neo-gothic fairytale Indivisible, director Edoardo De Angelis’ powerful and award-winning new drama portrays a woman desperately striving to escape a life of vice and criminality.

In a town on the far outskirts of Naples, trash-scarred beaches are the haunts of prostitutes, drug traffickers and hustlers. It’s in this drizzly, neon-lit hell we find Maria (an arresting Pina Turco, Gomorrah TV Series), a woman who lives without dreams or desires, haunted by memories from her past. She spends her days inextricably caught up in the child trafficking business, ferrying pregnant women across the river, leading them and their unborn children to their fate. When a twist of fate comes knocking, Maria is delivered a fragile miracle that will force the hand of change in her life.

Set in Caserta, north of Naples, and with dialogue largely in dialect, De Angelis once again creates an incredible sense of place and conveys the most desperate of realities in this this evocative and emotionally charged story of conviction and renewal.