Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Naples, Trajan's district. Initially it was intended for the inhabitants of the shantytowns on the seafront of Naples, who were homeless after the war. But it soon became a kind of ghetto. Alessandro and Pietro are two teenagers who film with an iPhone to tell their difficult neighborhood, their daily life, the friendship that binds them.
Selfie is a distinctive documentary in which two Neapolitan teenagers use an iPhone to document their own marginalised neighbourhood, Trajan's district. The self-shooting conceit gives the film a raw, intimate authenticity that sets it apart from conventional social documentaries — the subjects become co-authors of their own story, blurring the line between filmmaker and subject in a genuinely fresh way. The plot is loosely episodic and observational rather than dramatically structured, which works thematically but limits narrative momentum. The performances/presence of Alessandro and Pietro feel natural and unguarded. The iPhone cinematography is deliberately rough but purposeful, though it lacks the visual ambition that would push it to exceptional. The ending resolves quietly and somewhat inconclusively, leaving the audience with an open, somewhat unsatisfying sense of incompleteness — honest, but not particularly resonant as a formal choice.