The story of the black inhabitants of Naples, especially of a group of young people.
This autumn chronicle, this modern "farewell to youth", takes place in Naples but it could be also Milan or New York. Il nero is not a film on black people, but a film by blacks, the first Italian film by blacks.These black Italians (or "children of Madonna", as they are called in Naples) are the first blacks in the Italian history. This means that they don't have any tradition, any race, any past, any history and no folklore. They belong to young people, to the youngest.Their life is lived in the moment. It's like that for Silvano, Mario, Orchidea, Joy, Alessandra and the other young Italians and foreigners, black and white, protagonists of the film. Guided by the free friendship linking Mario and Orchidea, we know one Naples, made of car dealerships, banks, music halls, television, corruption. While following the stories of Silvano, Joy and Alessandra, we meet another Naples, and with it the lower middle class, the elegance, family life and fathers and mothers, their authority being beyond any power.Alessandra and Silvano, children of the same mother, love each other: theirs is maybe an incestuous relationship, but not a pornographic one, an affair stimulating their consciousness, not their senses. Mario's and Orchidea's subplot on one side and Silvano's and Alessandra's subplots on the other (but also the story-line of Joy, the Nigerian student in love with Silvano) remain separate, even if sometimes intertwine, just like in a jazz session...They meet also in the episode of the military visit, as 20 years passed since the end of Second world war and among the large number of white recruits, we also find some recruits with a darker skin, born in the post-war period.This film starts like a juvenile narrative, something like a day in the lifetime of a high school student and ends up on the threshold of the military experience. In addition to the image of a group of young people from Naples, though, in this film we also find the image of the generation of today: their way to express, to look around, meet and separate from each other, before saying farewell to youth.Giovanni Vento, Foreword to the Film (from the catalog of Berlin International Film Festival, section Week of Young Cinema, 1967)
