Directed by Roberto Rossellini • 1948 • France, Italy, West Germany
Starring Edmund Meschke, Ernst Pittschau, Ingetraud Hinze
The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin, seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy. Living in a bombed-out apartment building with his sick father and two older siblings, young Edmund is mostly left to wander unsupervised, getting ensnared in the black-market schemes of a group of teenagers and coming under the nefarious influence of a Nazi-sympathizing ex-teacher. GERMANY YEAR ZERO is a daring, gut-wrenching look at the consequences of fascism, for society and the individual.
Up Next in Italian Neorealism
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Bitter Rice
Directed by Giuseppe De Santis • 1949 • Italy
Starring Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman, Doris DowlingDuring planting season in Northern Italy’s Po Valley, an earthy rice-field worker (Silvana Mangano) falls in with a small-time criminal (Vittorio Gassman) who is planning a daring heist of the...
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The Flowers of St. Francis
Directed by Roberto Rossellini • 1950 • Italy
Starring Brother Nazario Gerardi, Brother Severino Pisacane, Esposito BonaventuraIn a series of simple and joyous vignettes, director Roberto Rossellini and co-writer Federico Fellini lovingly convey the universal teachings of the People’s Saint: hu...
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Stromboli
Directed by Roberto Rossellini • 1950 • Italy, United States
Starring Ingrid Bergman, Mario VitaleThe first collaboration between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman is a devastating portrait of a woman’s existential crisis, set against the beautiful and forbidding backdrop of a volcanic isla...
