While Rome continues to be the center of the Italian film industry, Naples is stealing the spotlight as a destination for filmmakers. Directors are flocking to the region, along Italy's southern coast, to capture a rarely seen side of the country. Film fans worldwide may be more accustomed to seeing Italy through the lush lens of Federico Fellini's masterpiece La Dolce Vita or Paolo Sorrentino's glamorous Oscar-winner The Great Beauty. But films like Matteo Garrone’s Naples-set Mafia drama Gomorrah (2008), and the hit TV show based on the same material, have what it takes to explore Italy's seedy underbelly.

"This ground is like a magnet for me," says director Edoardo De Angelis, whose child-trafficking drama The Vice of Hope, which is set in the drug-ridden Castel Volturno outside Naples, has its European premiere in Rome. "Watching a movie, I think an audience wants to find a synthesis of life. Everybody has an underbelly." Garrone's Dogman, a fable about a good man turned criminal, is Italy's foreign-language Oscar submission this year. Its desolate Naples-set cinematography recalls the best of Italian neorealism, as does its story about a gentle dog groomer forced into a world of violence.