italian neorealism

Born from the rubble of postwar Italy, neorealism rejected studio artifice for location shooting, non-professional actors, and stories about ordinary people — the unemployed, the dispossessed, children in bombed cities. Rossellini, De Sica, and Visconti built a cinema of witness: long takes, natural light, and narratives that refused tidy resolution because the real world didn't offer any. Its moral authority and formal innovations directly inspired the French New Wave, British social realism, and virtually every national cinema that followed.

Distinguish from

French New Wave drew on neorealism's location-shooting ethos but added formal experimentation — jump cuts, direct address, genre play — that neorealism's transparency intentionally avoided. British New Wave shares the working-class focus but operates in an industrial English setting with angrier, more confrontational protagonists.

Films here also carry Found Family, Class Warfare, Moral Ambiguity, Identity Crisis, War Trauma · Most represented: Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Mario Monicelli, Roberto Benigni, Michelangelo Antonioni.