ABSTRACT
Jonas Carpignano’s Mediterranea (2015) and A Ciambra (2017) have met with great national and international acclaim. Focussing on the Italian South and contemporary multiethnic migration to Italy, both films are shot with an aesthetic which departs from Italian cinema’s preferred modes of engagement with these topics (documentary and narrative realism). Carpignano’s work is often situated within the politically radical tradition of Italian neorealism, yet his films complicate the national homogeneity which the neorealist canon proposed. This chapter first investigates the terms of Carpignano’s critical popularity through the optic of queer theories of temporality to understand more accurately the conservative underpinnings of his films’ success and the presumed ‘return’ to neorealism. It then goes on to offer a different reading of Carpignano’s work in which Queer Theory is used as the means to identify the occurrence of a series of non-national subjects whose transnational, transmigratory affiliations contest the comfort of any return to familiar expressions of Italian cinema.
