Chasing the Real: Italian Neorealism

‘…to observe every part of reality, to look at things inside and outside at the same time, to film the aura around things, to reveal that which is elusive, arcane, magical, and possesses life. Isn’t neorealism all of these things?’
– Federico Fellini

Neorealism came to exist out of a moral necessity, following the urgency, as Cesare Zavattini, one of the movement’s architects, put it, to ‘find the hidden drama in everyday life’. When the subject of art becomes ordinary life, reality becomes spectacle. This two-month season features the different formal approaches taken by seven directors who made reality such a spectacle. We present 20 titles, from rarely shown gems to seminal works (such as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione), alongside a number of peripheral films that assimilated American and Soviet influence, and which expanded the boundaries of neorealism. This decisive decade is ripe for rediscovery; it’s been 80 years since Rossellini started work on Rome, Open City and 70 years since the ‘official’ end of the movement, yet it remains relevant to our current times in its ability to teach us the importance of freedom and to reinforce our capacity for compassion.

Giulia Saccogna, season curator

With thanks to

Camilla Cormanni, Paola Ruggiero, Germana Ruscio, Marco Cicala at Cinecittà.

Carmen Accaputo at Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna.