(translated with my bad Italian from CineCittà News.)
Director Matteo Garrone had wanted him for his film, Gomorrah, but Aniello Arena was serving a life sentence in prison and couldn’t leave Volterra. Arena had joined a theatrical troupe while incarcerated and was discovered by Garrone, who in 2011 got prison officials to change their minds and chose him to play the protagonist in the film he was making, Reality. In Reality, Arena is Luciano, the fishmonger who follows his dream, rather, his obsession, to be on the TV reality show “Grande Fratello” (the very popular Italian version of the show, “Big Brother”).
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When Reality won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Arena had to celebrate over the phone in his cell with Garrone, who was at Cannes, but when the film opened in Italy prison officials let him out to participate in the press conference in Rome.
Now, the story of the redemption of this “fine-pena-mai” (he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be released) has just been released in a book written by Aniello with Cristina Olati called ‘L’aria È Ottima (Quando Riece a Passare). (The air is wonderful – when it can flow).
Arena tells about a voyage that begins from a rough childhood in Barra, a suburb of Naples; he had a passion for the guitar and dance, and when he was very small he loved school. His father made his living smuggling black market cigarettes and his mother worked in a shoe factory.
Childhood ended at age 12 when he left school and started looking for work; his father was arrested, and since from him Arena had inherited a fascination with easy money, at age 16 he started a purse snatching career. Arena’s first arrest came at age 19 when he snatched the wrong purse and got caught, and from that point on he lived his life in and out of jail. In 1993 when a robbery ended badly and three people ended up dead, the prison doors closed permanently for Arena.
The book’s story is told chronologically over Arena’s prison years until he found himself at the one at Volterra, where he experienced a “rebirth”, a refound hope and reason to live a different life. Director Armando Punzo had started a theatrical group in the prison with the idea that “people can change if the institutions change them.”
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