Italian cinema still brings us beautiful, contemporary Neorealist films. Rosa Pietra Stella is the lively fiction feature debut from documentary director Marcello Sannino. The protagonist is 30-year-old Carmela (the title of the film refers to a line from a song with the same title: “Rose, rock, star”), who scrapes together a living doing a range of odd jobs. Her situation becomes more complicated when a deal to provide visas to illegal migrants through a lawyer goes badly wrong, leading to her being evicted from her home along with her mother and her eleven-year-old daughter, Maria. The story portrays everyday life and survival in Portici, the old, multicultural part of Naples where Sannino himself grew up. With a superb eye for local details and a great cast, he tells a nuanced, unsentimental, empathetic tale.

In Italian and Neapolitan with English subtitles. Available only in the U.S.