Anti-mafia writer Roberto Saviano is to make his debut as a film director with an animated feature based on a comic he co-authored on his early-life experience with the violence of the Neapolitan Mafia and how exposing them irrevocably changed his life.

The cartoon, Sono Ancora Vivo ((I’m Still Alive) is taken from the graphic novel of the same name 43-year-old Saviano wrote and Israeli comics artists Asaf Hanuka drew, Variety reported Monday.

It will be Saviano’s first cinema work on the Camorra since Matteo Garrone’s 2008 film Gomorrah, taken from Saviano’s bestelling expose’ of the same name that forced him into round-the-clock police protection.

Sono Ancora Vivo delves into how the writer’s life was transformed after he lifted the lid on the Naples Mob and in particular the bloody and powerful Casalesi clan whose death threats earned him his life with a constant police escort that has inevitably meant an existence almost on the run from the Camorra.

After the film of Gomorrah, which won the second prize at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Saviano’s life became even more protected and he found it hard to keep up an ordinary family existence.

Gomorra, a play on Camorra, later inspired a TV series of the same name which was an international hit.

Hanuka is one of Israel’s top cartoonists and worked on Ari Felman’s 2008 reflection on the war in Lebanon in 1982, Waltz with Bashir, which won the 2009 Golden Globe for best animated feature.

Sono Ancora Vivo is an international coproduction of MAD Entertainment and Lucky Red (Italy), GapBusters (Belgium) and SIPUR (Israel).

It has been written by Saviano with Alessandro Rak, Filippo Bologna, and Stefano Piedimonte.

The project will be presented in Bordeaux during the upcoming Cartoon Movie Festival which will run from Tuesday to Thursday, March 7-9, in the French city. (ANSA).

Source: ANSA News Agency