TORONTO—Italy’s counterpart of persecuted novelist Salman Rushdie is a journalist named Roberto Saviano who dared to tell the truth about a Naples crime tsunami that has turned the city into an armed camp. Saviano has been marked for death by the Naples Mafia, known as the Camorra, which took great offence to his book, Gomorra, which named names. Given the threats against Saviano’s life, it hardly made sense that anyone would want to adapt the book into a film. However, Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone decided that a film version was necessary. At last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Garrone said he shot the film, called Gomorrah in its English release, in the same parts of Naples that Saviano wrote about. He says he wasn’t concerned about retribution because the movie he made is metaphorical.

“I decided to go in a different direction from the book,” he said in a Toronto hotel room. “The book is filled with whistle-blowing and real names and goes in a very journalistic direction. We wanted to go in a more abstract direction with the movie, one that could be a metaphor about things that are true in every country.”¦The book is filled with hundreds of possible movies but does not suggest a single film.”

The film tells several stories about crime in Naples. The list includes: the story of a man hired by the Camorra to distribute money to families of its imprisoned members; one about a 13-year-old who has to go through a severe initiation to join a gang; a story about two young men who try to live out their Scarface fantasies; the tale of a dissident member of a gang that dumps toxic waste into local mines; and one about a tailor who decides to train Chinese garment workers who are taking work from Camorra-sponsored companies. The movie opens in Vancouver on Friday (April 3).

Although Garrone said he didn’t fear that he would be assassinated if he made the movie, he did have some reasonable concerns. But he decided that if he was going to make the movie work he had to make it in the Camorra’s backyard. “Saviano was under protection at that time,” he said, “and so I started to worry. But when I went to Naples, I saw that the scenery was so powerful I had to shoot there. I felt that the reality of those neighbourhoods is that it is a jungle or an ecosystem that is very closed. So when something new arrives, something that gives these people the possibility of doing something different, like participating in our project, they are happy to do it. We told them that it was about the Camorra, not against them.”¦We wanted to show that there was a kind of grey zone where the world becomes confused between good and bad, and legal and illegal. For me, that was the central theme for the movie.”

A resident of Rome, Garrone was unfamiliar with Naples. He said in Toronto that his opinion about the Camorra began to change over the weeks he spent making his movie. He thought of his time there as being similar to working in a war zone.

“My point of view about Naples has changed since this movie because I spent six months in a war territory and I have met people who do not think of themselves as residents of an Italian city as much as they see themselves as surviving a war. There were people we talked to whose parents were killed”¦they were always living in fear and they were isolated.”¦When I went back to Rome to my quite safe life, I brought with me a part of that reality. I met a girl when I was shooting there and we have a child together. She comes from that reality, and when I took her to [the film’s premiere in] Cannes, it was the furthest she had been in her life. She had never been further from Naples than Rome until then, and she was 31.”