John Tuturro's "Passione: A Musical Adventure" which explores contemporary and traditional music in Napoli, aka Naples, formerly know as Neopolis, and before that, Parthenope, plays through this evening at the Brooklyn Heights Cinema and Brooklyn Academy of Music.
While it has drawn comparisons to "Buena Vista Social Club" the film draws on the cultural complexity and ethnic diversity of this southern Italian city, one of the oldest, continually inhabited cities in the world. Billboard reports that a concert tour of performers appearing in the film is scheduled in Italy, and plans are underway for bringing the musicians and singers to the US.
As a thoroughly assimilated American/New Yorker whose ancestors hail from Napoli and Bari, it is fascinating to explore the contemporary iterations of the traditional roots of this music that was so familiar to me growing up in an Italian-American household in Brooklyn. Yet, when we visited a couple of years ago, at the time my oldest daughter developed genuine fluency after spending a year at the University of Urbino, Napoli (which is my surname) seemed such a foreign country to me. Rome seemed more familiar, more comfortable, reflecting dreams and aspirations. It occurred to me that Rome reflects the more polished, urbane and high culture aspects of New York, and Napoli, the more struggling, and striving, aspects of New York, a collision of high and low cultures, emananting from a complex, diverse mix of individuals of all walks of life, ethnicities, races and cultures. Rome is, of course, unique like no other city, but with aspects of Manhattan's Fifth Ave, Madison and Park Avenues. Napoli is, of course, likewise a uniquely historical city, but with aspects of Canal Street, the Lower East Side, Williamsburgh and Bed Stuy. Wonderful, too, that Mr. Tuturro, whose roots are in Sicily and Puglia (Bari), created this film that opens another door to the truth and the romance of Napoletan culture.
Catch it if you can.
Passione (directed by John Turturro)-"Tammuriata nera" - Peppe Barra, Max Casella, M'BarkaBen Taleb.