Rossellini subverts rules with the first instalment of the War Trilogy: this groundbreaking work, planned in secret during the Nazi occupation of Rome, and approaching its 80th anniversary, is widely recognised as the first neorealist film. Mixing fact and fiction, this story of life and death depicts the struggles of four Roman partisans during the German occupation: a working-class couple, the priest about to marry them and an intellectual. Rossellini and his collaborators (including a young Fellini) created a powerful choral story of a city dominated by fear, violence, moral degradation and the raw courage of its inhabitants. Shot on the streets of Rome, and in a makeshift studio, only six months after the liberation of the city – while Germany still occupied Northern Italy – the film features a largely non-professional cast, except for Aldo Fabrizi and a magnetic and memorable Anna Magnani. Moving seamlessly between levity and brutality, this is reality in all its vivid dynamism and the beginning of a new way of seeing in cinema.

Cast:
Aldo Fabrizi, Marcello Pagliero, Harry Feist, Anna Magnani