Paisà

Roberto Rossellini's Paisà opened in 1946 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Rossellini, Federico Fellini and Sergio Amidei among the credited screenwriters. The film is the second instalment of Rossellini's loose neorealist War Trilogy after Rome, Open City (1945) and before Germany Year Zero (1948). The film consolidated Rossellini as the central figure of post-war Italian neorealism alongside De Sica and Zavattini.

The film is structured as six self-contained episodes, each set in a different location and moment of the broader Allied liberation of Italy: Sicily in July 1943, Naples in autumn 1943, Rome in early 1944, Florence in mid-1944, the Apennine mountains in autumn 1944, and the Po Delta in spring 1945. Each vignette captures a fleeting human encounter between Italians and Allied soldiers, encounters of language difficulty, partial trust, gradual mutual recognition, and the broader human-scale weight of the broader military advance.

The film's commitment to actual location shooting (in the immediate post-war period when much of the Italian-rural landscape was still substantially battle-damaged), to substantially-non-professional casts, and to a register of restrained-realist-procedural cinema produced one of the foundational works of post-war European cinema. Otello Martelli's photography of the Italian-southern-and-central-rural exteriors anchors a film whose continuing reception has been substantial across the eight decades since release.