Germany Year Zero

Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (Germania anno zero) opened in 1948 and won the Golden Leopard at Locarno that year. The film completes Rossellini's loose neorealist War Trilogy after Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946), and was shot in the actual ruins of postwar Berlin during what was effectively the first cinematic engagement with German civilian-life devastation by an Italian director. Rossellini dedicated the film to his eldest son Romano, who had died in 1946.

Twelve-year-old Edmund (Edmund Moeschke, a non-professional Berlin child cast on the streets) struggles to help his destitute family survive in the bombed-out Berlin of late 1947, his consumptive father bedridden, his older brother in hiding for fear of war-crime arrest, his sister forced into informal sex-work for cigarettes and food. Edmund spends his days hawking small objects on the black market, and is briefly drawn into a relationship with a former teacher who continues to mouth Nazi ideology and pederastic exploitation in the rubble.

The film's location shooting in actual Berlin ruins (Rossellini negotiated with the Soviet, French and American occupation authorities for permission to shoot) produced one of the most distinctive period documents in any of the post-war neorealist works. Robert Juillard's photography of the rubble streets, the ruined Reichskanzlei, the bombed-out apartment blocks operates as both dramatic background and historical record. The closing sequence is among the most quietly devastating in any neorealist film.