An eighth grade class at the Adelaide Ristori school in the heart of the historic centre of Naples. Twenty students who live in Forcella neighbourhood where poverty, unemployment and a high school dropout rate are normal. And where the Camorra targets younger boys to recruit.
When they were in the seventh-grade, they took a financial education course with a practical and concrete element: identifying a destination for their eighth-grade school trip and doing all the financial and logistical planning. They chose Venice, the northern city that floats on the water. For them, this is a very expensive and distant destination, but it is the place they dream of seeing. They now have to find the money to go there. The families cannot afford to pay, but these 13-year-olds entering their teens are passionate, curious, funny and capable of dreaming. Will they manage to put together the budget to go to Venice? Who will help them? If they manage to leave, will they come back the same or changed?
A film about a school trip from Naples to Venice to recount the inequalities, social tensions, and luck of hopes of a criminality riddled area in central Naples, but also the dreams and the extraordinary humanity of a group of teenagers who are capable of revealing a world through a smile or by uttering a phrase, or through the joy and sadness of their gaze.
This documentary wants to talk about Italy as it is today and about the one we might be able to build in the future. To do so, we are going to film some extraordinary adolescents, who remind us of the innocence of those portrayed by Pasolini in the 1960s.