Vittorio De Sica

Vittorio De Sica started as a performer. He built a strong reputation in the theatre first, then moved to the screen, and he never gave up acting while directing, appearing in more than a hundred and fifty films up to his death in 1974. He rose to the front rank of Italian neorealism, a movement that wanted to scrape off the gloss of the Hollywood manner and make contact with the person on the ground. Shoeshine told of street children and Umberto D. of a retired civil servant. He is remembered above all for Bicycle Thieves, a heart-wrenching film in which a father and his small son search the streets of Rome for their stolen bicycle. He made several films with the screenwriter and theorist Cesare Zavattini, both of them believing that the stories of small people were stronger than Hollywood spectacle. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis won the Berlinale's highest award, the Golden Bear, in 1971.