Ragazzi fuori

I saw the movie 15 years ago, so I don't have a perfect recollection of it. However, I would like to leave some remarks.

• "Ragazzi Fuori" is the sequel of another movie, again by Marco Risi: "Mery per Sempre". So, if you want to be introduced to the story, the environment the kids live in and the characters, start with "MpS" first.

• Most of the actors are not professionals. They are real "street-kids", that were asked to perform "themselves" in these two features. What is really sad, is that many of them in their real lives kept on ending up in prison with more and more serious charges. Some also died, either killed in some gang related homicides or because of drug abuse.

• The kids talk in a very strong dialect. I am from the North of Italy, while the main characters are from Sicily. When I watched the movie with my friends in Milan, we could not understand a single word, and we had to turn on the closed captions for the hearing impaired (which luckily were in plain Italian) to understand most of the dialogues. This is to say that the director has been very honest in this respect, making the people talk as they would be doing in their "turf".

• Unfortunately, the movie describes in a very precise and realistic way the poor neighborhoods of Palermo, which are not very different from the ones you would find in other large Italian cities (particularly in the South, which is economically disadvantaged).

• Another comment was asking "[...] leaves you with same question: Why do things turn out like they do?". I think Marco Risi answer would go along these lines. Because if you are born in the worst area of Palermo, with a diffuse stigma, where the only potential employer for young adults is the Mafia, in a family whose "values" are shaky to say the least, surrounded by peers that are on the wrong tracks, you have little chances to behave differently. You have some chances to "save yourself" either if you are very strong willed (Mery in the movie) and/or if you manage to break the status quo, namely by moving to a different city.

I've been looking for info on this film for awhile, but it never showed up on a search until now. I saw this movie under the name 'Chicos De La Calle' in Spain in 1992 and it is an interesting character study of some aimless young adults. Can't really call them kids, and the only innocence they retain is a semblance of childhood ignorance. When I saw Larry Clark's Kids I was immediately reminded of this film. Less crude by far than Kids, Chicos de la Calle never the less leaves you with same question: "Why do things turn out like they do?"

It was Pasolini who championed the plight of the Ragazzi putting their stories centre stage in his contribution to Italian realist cinema.

This film follows a number of others like it, which continue to highlight the violence and poverty in southern Italian cities and it's impact on the young as they grow up in such an environment.

Interestingly, the film is set in Palermo and uses (in a homage to Pasolini ?) real street boys as the protagonists. Considering the degree of Mafia control in Palermo, it must have been some feet to have pulled this off. What we have is more of the same hopelessness and violence seen in other recent films but with flashes of great character study mixed with glimpses of a city not usually prone to cinematic intrusion.