Germany, Year Zero

The last film of Rossellini's war trilogy, after Rome Open City and Paisà, and unlike the other two it takes place on the side of the defeated. It was shot in 1947 in the actual ruins of Berlin. The city is not a set; the camera walks through rubble, along streets that had really been destroyed. Edmund is twelve. His father is ill and bedridden, his older brother is hiding because he was a soldier, his sister is trying to find money in the nightclubs. Edmund goes out to sell scrap, to the black market, looking for work in the street. His old schoolteacher still speaks to him in the language of the Nazi period: it is natural for the weak to be eliminated. The film's subject is what a child does after hearing that sentence. In the final passage Rossellini's camera walks Edmund through the ruins at length and explains nothing. Rossellini dedicated the film to his son Romano, who died in 1946 at the age of nine. Who it is for: viewers curious about Italian neorealism and post-war cinema. Who it is not for: anyone with a low tolerance. It proceeds through a child, offers no hope, and its final passage is among the heaviest endings in cinema.