Gregorio Napoli

In the Sicily of the late 1940s, two brother sculptors, tired of selling madonnas to the local churches, finally realize their dream, and set up a Sicilian production company, thanks to the help of a local bishop. They start producing one box-office failure Z-movie after the other, all with terribly bad local non-pros as actors. Covered in debts, they finally have their great chance, when a local nobleman obsessed by magic decides to invest all his wealth in the making of a movie about Cagliostro, just one year after Orson Welles' Black Magic (1949). They hire a famous American actor (Robert Englund) and start shooting "The Return of Cagliostro".

A young director years old, lives with a girl. Active part of the Intellectual society, he represents perfectly the union between fear and determination, that changes deeply his way of understanding the world that surrounds him. His only aim is to leave a footstep of his presence on this world realizing a film.

In relation to some of Pasolini's visits to Palermo for this last film, in 2000 Ciprì and Maresco shot Arruso, which begins with a phrase by Pasolini ("I banished the word hope from my vocabulary") and consists of imaginary interviews with some local characters who are presumed to have had homosexual relationships with the director. The two record the testimonies, sometimes affectionate others less, of those who had the opportunity to meet him and know the trends on the occasion of that trip.

"I migliori nani" simulates the television programs that have dominated much of Italian programming since the 1990s: a studio and a series of what in conventional television would be called "reports," but which are actually excursions into a twisted, mutilated, and discordant world.