Rosa Pietra Stella

Carmela is thirty, beautiful, wild and untamed. 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, but now she hopes to turn things around and be better."