Music Box Films has officially announced and detailed its upcoming Blu-ray release of Claudio Giovannesi's film Piranhas (2019), starring Francesco Di Napoli, Viviana Aprea, and Renato Carpentieri. The release will be available for purchase on December 10.
Eager and motivated to make his mark, a 15-year-old boy and his friends from the slums of Naples enter the violent world of crime in PIRANHAS, directed by Claudio Giovannesi and based on the 2018 novel La Paranza dei Bambini (The Children's Parade) by co-screenwriter Roberto Saviano, whose 2006 book Gomorrah and 2008 film of the same name laid the groundwork for virtually all subsequent Mafia-themed cinema since.
For PIRANHAS, international bestselling author Saviano returned to his home city with a novel of gang warfare and a teenager's desire to rise to the top of Naples's darkly attractive criminal underworld.
Fifteen-year-old Nicola (newcomer Francesco Di Napoli) lives with his mother and younger brother in the Sanità neighborhood of Naples, an area that has been controlled by the Camorra mafia for centuries. Dreaming of a life lush with designer clothing and elite nightclub bottle service, Nicola and his group of friends create a new paranza, a gang. Learning how to cheat and steal, along with how to shoot semiautomatic pistols and AK-47s, they break into the local drug trade, a portal to the violent, power-hungry world of mafia crime. In short order, Nicola and his cohorts' rapid rise and envelopment in their new world soon begins to threaten their innocence and relationships, as well as the safety of their families.
"Although inspired by current events, the film is not intended to be a description of events that actually took place. Naples is only the setting, but the theme of the film is beyond the place of its staging," says director/co-screenwriter Giovannesi of PIRANHAS. "What is at the heart of our story is the protagonist's age and how this relates to his irreversible choice of becoming a criminal. An age of innocence in which we experience choosing what is good and what is evil."
An international festival favorite that picked up awards at the Bari International Film Festival and Bucharest International Film Festival, among others, PIRANHAS most notably won the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Screenplay at the Berlin International Film Festival and a Silver Ribbon for Best Cinematography from the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists.