With her mother dead and her father in prison, Nevia and her little sister live with her grandmother in a container park on the outskirts of Naples. It’s not the best place for her to grow up. Her grandmother rents out her rooms to prostitutes and runs odd chores for the local crime boss to try and repay the debts Nevia’s father owes. Nevia despises her grandmother for bringing men into their home.
Nevia’s other problem is that Salvatore, the 30 year old son of the crime boss, is infatuated with her. Even though she’s only 17 (and looks younger), he’s already asking her grandmother for her hand in marriage. The prostitution to many men or prostitution to Salvatore is what Nevia fears is her fate.
To escape, she finds work with the local circus. They provide her independence and a more complete family then the one she has at home. It allows her to wean herself away from her grandmother and Salvatore. But when she finds the circus leader has his own problems, she’s redirected to the fate she tried to escape.
Nevia looks a lot like the recent Neapolitan films of Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah, Dogman). It contains the same grimy urban landscape of rubbish strewn across roads, battered apartment blocks, and lots of concrete and tarmac. It’s a hopeless forgotten Italy in which opportunity doesn’t exist. The only people who succeed are involved in crime, and those that don’t are inevitably linked to them whether they want to or not.
Like Dogman’s main character, Nevia is linked to the criminal underworld by means outside her control. She comes into contact with the criminal bosses because of her father and grandmother. She’s doomed to Salvatore just for living where she grew up. It’s not a problem with her but a condition of the hopeless environment she grows up in.
The welcome difference of Nevia is that it’s led by Nevia, a young female protagonist growing up with her female relatives. It therefore provides a female perspective of life in the hopeless outskirts of urban Italy. The environment for them is much more restrictive than the criminal freedom it afford the men.
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