The Intimate Bond Between Naples and Its Filmmakers

Naples asks for a personal relationship. It's too real to be observed from a distance, too layered to be flattened into a postcard. The directors who have best told its story — from Mario Martone to Paolo Sorrentino, from Antonio Capuano to Stefano Incerti — have built a deep, often conflicted, but always honest dialogue with the city.
They didn’t try to “represent” Naples — they let it write itself through their stories.

• Martone: a city of origins and wounds
  Mario Martone made Naples the beating heart of his cinema. In his films — from Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician to The King of Laughter, Nostalgia to The Mayor of Rione Sanità — the city becomes both body and metaphor, cradle and abyss. Martone explores its neighborhoods as rooms in a collective memory, searching for the point where Naples stops being geography and becomes existential condition.

   

• Sorrentino: Naples as dream and loss
  For Paolo Sorrentino, Naples is a place of the soul. Raised in the city’s upper districts, he recounts it with a dreamlike, melancholic, deeply personal lens. The Hand of God is perhaps his most explicit love letter: a film that retraces youth, grief, and the discovery of art — with Naples as the one constant backdrop.

   

• Capuano: anger and tenderness
  Antonio Capuano — less known to the general public but fundamental to Neapolitan cinema in the 1990s and 2000s — portrayed a raw, unvarnished Naples. His work is a scream of love and disillusionment, a political act. His characters are fragile, angry, deeply real — and Naples is their mirror.

   

• Foreign directors and the irresistible allure
  International filmmakers too have been drawn to Naples’ visual and symbolic force. John Turturro with Passione, Abel Ferrara with Napoli Napoli Napoli, and even Eat Pray Love have found something in the city that goes beyond aesthetics — something dramatic, seductive, and true.

Today, a new generation of filmmakers — often born in Naples but with global perspectives — continues to rewrite this cinematic relationship. Directors like Francesco Lettieri (Ultras), Sydney Sibilia (Mixed by Erry), and the team behind Mare Fuori present a fresh, urban, contemporary Naples that still manages to surprise and provoke.
For directors who love it — even when they criticize it — Naples is a co-author. A voice that interferes, shapes the narrative, dictates the rhythm. You can’t film Naples without entering its breath. And those who succeed in doing so leave a mark — both in cinema and in the city itself.