Il Capitone: queer (r)existence crosses the screen Orgoglio di Porta Venezia brings Camilla Salvatore's film to Milano Pride 2025 for an exclusive event
Porta Venezia is not just a neighborhood. It is an emotional architecture, a collective body, an affective geography pulsing with queer stories, desires, and memory. Thanks to Orgoglio Porta Venezia Milano 2025, the rainbow heart of the city transforms into a widespread cultural program, a collective laboratory of identity and resistance. Until June 30th, in celebration of Pride Month, across streets, bookstores, shop windows, and cultural centers, a temporary geography takes shape, one that celebrates diversity, freedom of expression, queer visibility, and the ongoing fight against all forms of discrimination. The calendar includes exhibitions, performances, talks, workshops, screenings, and community events, all designed to open spaces for dialogue about gender plurality, civil rights, and the future of inclusion.
Leading this vision are the founders Paolo Sassi, Silvia Beretta, Elena Di Marco, and Carlo Barbarossa, with a clear intent: "To celebrate diversity not as an exception, but as an essential part of the urban and human fabric of our city." They affirm: "It’s not enough to talk about inclusion. We must build structures where complexity can grow, not just be tolerated." In a time marked by tension and polarization, Orgoglio Porta Venezia is an act that refuses neutrality: it takes a stand with culture, creativity, and public participation. Within this context, one of the most compelling events on the calendar is the screening of Il Capitone, directed by Camilla Salvatore, on June 26th at Anteo Palazzo del Cinema. An event that goes beyond cinema to become a gathering, a performance, a shared ritual. A meeting point for visions and bodies. A political and emotional act that crosses the screen and inhabits the city.
Il Capitone: Queer Metamorphosis in the Body of Cinema
Il Capitone is a fish, sure. But it’s also a totemic, liquid, metamorphic figure. It never allows itself to be fully grasped, just like Salvatore’s medium-length film and its protagonists. This is a film that evades categorization. It’s not a documentary, not strictly fiction, not even fully cinema. It moves between these languages, inhabits them, and transcends them. Salvatore constructs a narrative through images and bodies that works as a performance: it doesn’t inform, doesn’t explain: it brings the viewer back to the present, to life as it happens. At the center is Vanessa, a young trans woman moving through a Naples that is visceral, symbolic, archaic and contemporary. Around her, Lina (her mother) and Ciro, a queer, almost mythological figure, help build a family geography that needs no explanation. Here, family is not inherited: it is chosen.
Resisting Through Beauty, Shining Through Otherness
Born in 1993 and holding an MA in Artists’ Film and Moving Image from Goldsmiths University of London, Camilla Salvatore doesn’t guide, doesn’t explain, doesn’t sweeten the message. She works through immersion. The viewer is called to enter: into the frame, into the voice, into the possibility of being otherwise. Blending visual art, performance theater, and cinema of the real, her direction challenges normative gazes and invites disarmament without needing many words. Vanessa dances and sings, transforming each scene into a performance. Like the eel that shifts form and habitat, the characters move through a Naples that is belly and voice, water and concrete, memory and present. What remains is a sense of conscious fluidity, a sexuality that resists commodification and moral imposition, and the courage to rewrite oneself: not as a dream, but as a real, tangible possibility.
The Screening on June 26th During Pride Month
“From the start, the goal was to build a safe space, a place where dreams and aspirations could take form away from others’ judgment. For us, to create is to resist the difficult context we live in. This journey is full of love; the genuine laughter dispels the pain, and life continues: beautiful despite its complexity.” So says director Camilla Salvatore. On June 26th, at Anteo Palazzo del Cinema, audiences will have the opportunity to discover more about the project and how it came to life. The event, part of the wider Orgoglio Porta Venezia Milano 2025 program, goes far beyond the screening of Il Capitone. It will feature the participation of the director and cast, with an introduction and moderation by Sabato De Sarno, former Gucci creative director.
A Film, a Community, a Neighborhood
In Porta Venezia, nothing is just background. Every corner is a stage, every body a story. This neighborhood, pulsing heart of Milan’s Pride Month, is where Il Capitone finds its most natural setting. A film that speaks of transition, desire, and self-expression, but more than that, it roots itself in a real, shared space inhabited daily by those who choose to show up, even when it’s uncomfortable. Porta Venezia has long been the center of queer life in Milan, but also a living urban lab for co-existence. A place where the city becomes permeable and ever-changing. Camilla Salvatore’s film arrives not by accident: it belongs here. It is part of a culture that demands visibility not as a gift, but as a necessary act. Telling Vanessa’s story (her voice, her body, her city) means making room for marginalized identities. It’s a celebration of trans visibility as both artistic and political potential, without compromise or reduction. It’s a reminder that every identity is built through relationship. That every body, in order to resist, needs a community. In this context, the evening of June 26th will not just be about cinema. It will be encounter, collective affirmation, shared presence. Another reminder that queer culture today doesn’t ask for space. It takes it.