Baraccopolis (2016)

A human being out of six in the world lives in a slum. Thousands of them are in Italy: they are victims of the economic crisis, of adverse circumstances, of the indifference of the public administration which for years, sometimes decades, turned a blind eye on a problem that became chronic. They are in Messina, where the slums date back to 1908, the year a devastating earthquake razed the city to the ground. In Lamezia Terme, where nearly 400 Calabrian ethnic Roma live on the edge of an open dump. In Foggia and Brescia, where dilapidated containers have become the forced residence of families who have lost their homes. They are all Italian citizens, but not even the government knows precisely how many: all that Istat - the Central Institute for Statistics - tells us is that at least 53,000 people in Italy live in the so-called "accommodations of the third kind", that is, different from a house: cellars, RVs, automobiles, and especially shacks. There's a reason why these data are so vague. A slum is a non-place that always sits on the border. On the border with the city proper, with civilization, with the facilities providing basic services, often on the border with reality. And for those who are confined there, even if they hold an Italian identity card, usually that border is impassable. Baraccopolis explores this reality, and the lives of those who are imprisoned there.