Originally commissioned by a Jesuit Group in Genoa as a documentary about the city's disenfranchised, The Mouth of the Wolf took shape only when director Pietro Marcello met Vincenzo Motta, a weathered man with a gripping story of struggle, violence, prison, and love. Motta and his partner, a transsexual woman named Mary Monaco, play themselves in a film that explores their hard journey and the precarious happiness they seem to have reached. Equally precarious is the hybrid mix of documentary and fiction filmmaking Marcello employs. Interweaving neorealist empathy with mythic storytelling, the director simply states, “The aesthetical way of the cinema for me is also the ethical way.”