The documentary is inspired by the narrative thread of the same text by Norman Lewis, a British official in southern Italy during the period of liberation, and later became a famous writer. The director Francesco Patierno, using some of the epic films (Istituto Luce Cinecittà , National Archives and Records Administration, Imperial War Museum, Getty Images) mixed with movies such as Liliana Cavani's The Skin and Nanny Loy's Four Days in Naples relives the atmosphere of desperate but living Naples in the immediate aftermath of the postwar period. An outspoken commentary by an Anglo-Saxon who looks at the devastated reality with an entomologist look, more than an anthropologist, raises the spectator a deep sense of uneasiness, not unlike the shame that many Italians have tried to compare their miserable condition with the well-being represented (and sometimes ostentatious) by Allied troops. To the delight of the end of the war is the chagrin of an entire city committed to craving cigarettes and chocolate thrown by Anglo-Saxon jeeps, or to sell their own body for a can of ration or a pair of silk stockings. It is a cautious yet never melodramatic complaint (also because it is told with apparent British detachment) of the devastation caused by the war, every war, and the attack on the human dignity it involves: informants, young ladies, children with tense hands. Mass hallucinations are manifestations of what the human being finds to become to ensure survival. It was premiered at the International Film Festival of Rome on October 18, 2016.
