In Nazi-occupied Rome, fate brings together the lives of the widow Pina, just about to remarry, the engineer Manfredi, a communist partisan on the run from the Gestapo, and Catholic priest Don Pietro, who tries to help both in their time of need. The first part of an unofficial trilogy on the Second World War, followed by Paisà (1946) and Germany, Year Zero (1948, presented in A Journey in the Festival’s History), Roberto Rossellini’s film was a forerunner of the new approach to filmmaking that critics would label Neo-Realism. Winner of the Grand Prix du Festival in Cannes in 1946, the film condenses the human and moral supremacy of the anti-fascist struggle into romantic glimpses of truth.
“This milestone of Italian cinema played at the very first edition of the Festival, alongside such works as Sergei M. Eistenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944), Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and John M. Stahl’s The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), back when screenings took place in the gardens of the Grand Hotel and each evening the relevant country’s flag would be hoisted, accompanied by the corresponding national anthem (in Italy’s case it was probably the patriotic song La Leggenda del Piave, as Mameli’s anthem didn’t become the official song of the Italian Republic until October of that year). Since then, oddly enough, this film by Rossellini, his fourth, has not been shown in Locarno since. Seeing today what Jacques Lourcelles calls ’an exploratory journal of the present’ in his Dictionnaire du cinéma, has a twofold testimonial impact. It also creates a strange temporal disparity between the half-destroyed, recently liberated Rome and the pleasant Locarno, which dreamed of freedom and created this ’Festival of the free world’ that greeted stars on the shores of the lake”.
Lili Hinstin
