Living Off Love

The exploitation of young men as prostitutes in the district around the Roman coliseum is the focus of Simon Bischoff's documentary and fiction piece that spares no close-up view of male anatomy. This latter trait reveals just as much about the tenor of this film as it does about the body. Several years earlier, Bischoff met the main 17-year-old protagonist here, "Er Moretto," when he was just a 13-year-old runaway. The intervening years show how he changed into a streetwise vendor of sex, and Bischoff also details how the 17-year-old is picked up by a middle-aged man to be his companion. Fiction segments do not fare as well as the documentary aspects of this work, which in the end, seems at least ambiguous, if not questionable, in its intent.

5

85 min

Cast

Alevino Di Silvio

as Franco

Franco Mazzieri

as Vampir

Vinicio Diamanti

as Tunte

Ciro Cascina

as Schamane

Rosa Di Brigida

as Verrückte

Irene Staub

as Anita Ekberg

Renato Faillaci

as Transvestite

Francesco Gnerre

as Renato

Lara Toljacian

as Vocalist

Director

Simon Bischoff