Le stanze aperte (2013)

A documentary journalist asks for admission inside the Mental Health Hospital in Secondigliano, Naples (Italy), working on a report about prisoners' painful stories willing to talk about inmates' daily lives. Doctors, volunteers and officers arrange program activities mainly to aggregate patients reminding themselves they are always human beings. Rain beat down steadily on the sad buildings of the metropolitan suburbs. For those people, even if sun shines, common reality is half a world away. Among the prisoners we meet Vincenzo Arte named "The master". A paradoxical and interesting man being intimately suspended between dream and waking; in timeless conflict between his artistic and creative imagination and conscious madness used as a sort of shield against the refusal of the family and the progressive loss of his identity. The reform of the prison system is asking for alternatives to imprisonment for individuals with mental illness: after years "the master" will finally go back home.