Nascondino (Hide and Seek): this document of Italian youth criminality is surprisingly unilluminating

The success of Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (2008), adapted from the bestselling 2006 novel-cum-exposé of the same name by Roberto Saviano, spawned a new image of the Italian mafia. Works such as the spin-off series Gomorrah, which ran for five seasons from 2014 to 2021, and Claudio Giovannesi’s 2019 feature Piranhas, also drawn from a book by Saviano, offer more sensationalised accounts of the Camorra’s activities in present-day Naples. Their focus is on the organisation’s young foot soldiers – the equivalent of the American ‘corner boys’ familiar from shows like The Wire (2002-08) and numerous crime films.

Victoria Fiore’s documentary Nascondino (Hide and Seek) follows one such youth – Entoni, a ten-year-old whose father and grandmother have been involved with the Camorra – over a span of four years, chronicling his slide into criminality. That the director intends her debut to be an act of reclamation and dispelling facile clichés is relayed explicitly through a shot of graffiti that reads, “We are not Gomorrah”, and in the closing credits, which dedicate the film to “all those who see, in the midst of hell, what hell is not”. It’s puzzling, then, that Fiore specifically references and even repeats scenes from films that traffic in stereotypes of Italian youth delinquency without inverting or attempting to complicate their impact. Like Piranhas, the film opens with a youth gang lighting a bonfire from discarded Christmas trees in the streets of the Quartieri Spagnoli, a central neighbourhood of Naples. There’s no mention of the fact that this is an illegal tradition among Neapolitan youths, who every 17 January compete to see who builds the most impressive blaze. Rather, Fiore constructs an exciting set-piece, replete with dramatic music and slow-motion, out of the animalistic ritual performed by the bare-chested, face-painted boys around the bonfire.

Despite their lurid excesses, works based on Saviano’s writings are grounded in his extensive journalistic research. By contrast, although it aims to expose the systemic causes behind Entoni’s predicament, Hide and Seek provides scant contextual information. The recent judiciary measure that enables the state to place him in a succession of foster homes and institutions because of his family background, for instance, receives but cursory mention in a news report. Fiore instead emphasises the personal dimension, which she attempts to convey through aestheticised re-enactments, fragmentary voiceovers and the repetition of would-be poetic images, such as close-ups of Entoni’s remorseful grandmother filing her nails or deeply inhaling a cigarette. Worthy intentions notwithstanding, this heavy-handed stylisation yields little insight into the emotional lives of Hide and Seek’s subjects, and even less into the social reality the film wishes to illuminate.

► Nascondino (Hide and Seek) is in UK cinemas now.