Paisan

The second film in Roberto Rossellini's war trilogy, telling the liberation of Italy from south to north. It is made of six separate episodes following the Allied advance: a landing in Sicily, an American soldier and a street child in Naples, a soldier and a woman meeting in Rome, a search in the middle of the fighting in Florence, a monastery in the Apennines, and partisans in the Po delta. There is no plot connecting the episodes; the connection is geography and time. The film's central matter is language. The Americans and the Italians do not understand each other, and Rossellini uses that not as a hitch but as the war itself. In some scenes the failure to communicate ends in death. Most of the cast are not professionals and in some episodes play themselves. It was shot on real locations immediately after the war ended; the ruin on screen was not built. Federico Fellini was among the writers. One of the foundational works for anyone curious about neorealism and postwar Italian cinema. For a viewer expecting a single story, the episodes are independent and their tones differ; some are close to comedy and some are straight tragedy.