A keenly awaited film on the Naples Mafia got a warm reception at the Cannes Film Festival Sunday night.
The film, Gomorra, based on the Roberto Saviano bestseller of the same name, was greeted with five minutes of applause from the festival public, jury, and European Union culture ministers.
''It's a marvelous film, worthy of the best Italian cinema tradition,'' said top French critic Daniele Heymann.
''Gomorra recounts a frightening Italy, it scares me,'' said Margaret Bream of the Toronto Star.
''It's a reality I know very well, it's Iraq,'' said Iraqi journalist Erfan Rachid.
Director Matteo Garrone had said during the shoot that his adaptation of the Saviano book would be ''a war film - a war taking place just 150km south of Rome''.
Italian Culture Minister Sandro Bondi said: ''It's a film of great civic value because it uncovers a real part of Italy, a place you can barely believe is part of this country''.
Gomorra is Italian for Gomorrah, the Biblical sister of Sodom, and is a play on the name of the Naples' crime syndicate, the Camorra.
Roman director Garrone picked five stories from Saviano's book to illustrate the Camorra's hold over Naples, its brutal use of kids and the drug and toxic-waste trafficking that feeds would-be glamorous lifestyles.
Saviano, a 28-year-old journalist whose round-the-clock police protection prevented him from taking to the Red Carpet, said he was happy with the ''realistic'' portrait of Camorristi who ape Hollywood mobsters while raking in profits that ''put Fiat to shame''.
Garrone, 38, one of a new wave of Italian film-makers, said he had got ''precious'' tips on ''how real Camorristi strut and preen before practising butchery'' from a young woman he met while shooting that he is soon to marry and have a child with.
He also paid tribute to the residents of a Camorra-controlled suburb of Naples where much of the film was shot - a couple of whom he gave cameo roles in the film.
''Though they live inside the Camorra 'system' they were still all over the shoot, giving advice and providing first-hand information,'' he said.
Gomorra shot to the top of the Italian box-office charts over the weekend, unseating Superhero.
It has had no press reviews yet but users of the Internet Movie Data Base have given it an 8.6 out of 10 rating.
Gomorra - which Garrone said had already got a dozen or so overseas distribution deals - is one of two Italian films competing for the Palme d'Or.
The other is Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo about veteran Italian statesman Giulio Andreotti.
Both star acclaimed Naples-born actor Toni Servillo.
