Struggling With Faith and Gentrification

THE Feast of San Gennaro, the celebration of the Neapolitan saint that transforms Little Italy in Manhattan into a tourist-thronged street fair every September, has made a few memorable movie appearances over the years. It was the bustling backdrop to Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” and the scene of a couple of violent crimes in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” trilogy. This year another Italian-American filmmaker took his turn: Abel Ferrara, chronicler of the downtown underbelly and lately a resident of the neighborhood.

On the final night of the feast last month — also the final night of shooting for his documentary about the event and the personalities in its orbit — Mr. Ferrara was racing up and down Mulberry Street, weaving through the bemused crowds and past the sausage and zeppole stands, looking for things to shoot and people to talk to, and finding material everywhere he turned.

“I didn’t want to shoot during the feast,” Mr. Ferrara said. “But it’s when the talent comes out.” Sure enough, the actor Danny Aiello was signing head shots in the back of one restaurant. In front of another the former Hell’s Angel and “Oz” star Chuck Zito was having dinner. In the restaurant La Mela the owner, Frankie Cee, who has appeared in a few of Mr. Ferrara’s films, was hosting the doo-wop singer Dion and his wife, Susan.

Watching Mr. Ferrara at work — a blur of continuous motion but a lot more in control than he lets on — you can almost see what gives his films their hallucinatory ambience. His movies thrive on a kind of hypnotic chaos, and Mr. Ferrara seemed to be feeding off the din and disarray of San Gennaro, actively looking for digressions. He tried to get a deli owner to reveal who he was voting for in the presidential elections (while a policeman watched warily), stopped for a snack at a falafel restaurant and struck up a conversation with the waiter (“Anyone ever tell you you look like Christopher Walken?”), and bantered with a neighborhood old-timer who goes by Skinny Vinnie. (For reasons unknown the encounter left Mr. Ferrara in possession, briefly, of a pineapple.)

Mr. Ferrara and Shanyn Leigh, an actress who has appeared in his films, have been living for the past few months in an apartment above La Mela. For Mr. Ferrara, 57, the San Gennaro project is a matter of some urgency, a way to reconnect with a neighborhood and a cultural heritage. “If I didn’t do this I would have to come back as a ghost,” he said.