Working Boys: the Non-Professional Boy Actor in Recent Italian Cinema

Since post-war neorealism, the figure of the boy recruited ‘from the streets’ to star in films of social commitment has loomed large in Italian cinema. These non-professional young (non)actors, themselves often workers, have been seen to function as symbols of a possible national rebirth, in a republic to be founded on work. This article analyses A Ciambra (Carpignano, 2017), Selfie (Ferrente, 2019), and Io capitano (Garrone, 2023). In these films boy non-actors play marginalized protagonists, who are undertaking some kind of paid or retributed work, sometimes underage and in informal or illegal economic networks. Within their lives, conditioned by work and its absence, the precarious status of the screen boy, between child and adult, encounters the labour of the untrained, non-professional child actor, who nonetheless possesses both a symbolic and an economic value for Italian arthouse cinema.