Trudie Styler told ANSA Tuesday at a screening of her 2023 documentary Posso entrare? An Ode to Naples at the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles that it had been a "revelation" when she finally visited the southern port city after years touring the Amalfi Coast and she was now a coffee addict after drinking the best brew of joe in Italy and the world there.

    "The discovery of Naples was a revelation for me.

I didn't just make a film, I fell in love with it", Styler, British director, actress and producer, sid during the screening in LA, the city where her director of photography, two-time Oscar nominee Dante Spinotti, of LA Confidential and Last of the Mohicans fame, lives.
    "We've known each other since 1987. Having him behind the camera was a gift", the 71-year-old Bromsgrove-born director confided, with the Italian maestro sitting next to her.
    "I didn't know the city at all - admits Styler - I worked in Rome; I gave birth to one of my four children in Pisa (Eliot Sumner, in 1990); Sting (her partner for over 40 years, married in 1992) and I have a house in Tuscany and we produce wine. I've often been to the Amalfi Coast. But why had I never stopped in Naples?".
    From there came the decision to accept the proposal of Rai Cinema and Mad Entertainment: "They gave me carte blanche, and that's how I felt: as if in front of an immaculate canvas, with only the desire to understand this complex and vital city". The title, that question that asks permission to observe and listen, comes from all the times the director finds herself knocking on doors and windows in the alleys, in the slums, in the buildings and in the sacristies.
    "I always heard the answer: 'Yes, come in, come.' It was a way to open a space of trust, to talk about your neighborhood, your needs, your dreams.
    So the phrase became the heart of the film." The voices that make up the documentary are many: from the housewife or the glove maker who lost her daughter, to Norma, a former swimming champion now in her nineties, who remembers Hitler's visit to Naples and the war.
    "Then there are well-known faces from the fight against the Camorra and "the civil renaissance" under Vesuvius: Father Antonio Loffredo, the parish priest who revolutionized the Rione Sanità, Roberto Saviano, Alessandra Clemente, the city councilor whose mother was killed by a stray bullet during a Camorra shootout or the activists against domestic violence of Forti Guerriere.
    The documentary, produced by Big Sur, Mad Entertainment with Rai Cinema and Luce Cinecittà, was presented two years ago at the Rome Film Fest and in 2024 at the Moma in New York.
    The opening sequence is by rapper Clementino, who summarizes 3,000 years of Neapolitan history in a 3-minute song. "I didn't want to give a history lesson, but they told me: you have to tell our roots. In the shower I had the idea to do it with a rap".
    Another exceptional musical moment comes with a very touching cameo by Sting, who takes up a guitar built with wood recovered from migrant boats and plays it under the barred windows of the Secondigliano prison.
    "It wasn't difficult to convince him, on the contrary", confides his wife and partner in many humanitarian campaigns.
    Styler, who in her long career has worked as a theatre actress, independent producer and committed director (among her films, 'Freak Show', focused on a queer teenager), smiles when recalling her daily life on the set: "I've never drunk so much coffee in my life. An espresso every hour. I've developed a kind of addiction".
   

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