Rose Stone Star

Carmela is thirty, beautiful and as wild and untamed as an Amazon. She struggles to get by on her own, doing endless oddjobs until she finds herself involved in a business racket with the immigrants who populate the maze of alleyways in the centre of Naples. It's like one of the circles of hell, where even to get a residence permit and then a job – you have to pay. She has an eleven-year old daughter called Maria. They live with her mother, Anna, in Portici, a nearby coastal town in the province of Naples. Their relationship is a fraught one: Anna wishes her daughter would lead a simpler, more grounded life; but instead she is making the same mistakes she herself made in her time. Carmela has been more of a sister than a mother to Maria. The girl suffers because of this and has long been monitored by social services. Carmela feels the time has now come to take on the responsibilities of motherhood. She desperately wants to win her daughter’s trust. She makes a sincere effort. She meets Tarek, a forty-year old Algerian who has lived in Naples for twenty years. He is strongly attracted to Carmela and feels no small amount of tenderness. But this fragile edifice on which she tries to build a life gradually starts to crumble. This is a story told against the backdrop of a city that acts as a metaphor of the contemporary world – multicultural and dust-laden, sensual and unjust, where sparse beams of sunlight merely serve to cultivate our illusions. A place where you can arrive but you can never leave.