Rome, Open City

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.

'Ubaldo Arata's visceral cinematography blends the grit of a documentary with the heart and soul of a drama' - Mark Kermode, Observer

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