The Path of Hope

Post-war Sicily. The village sulphur mine closes and hundreds of families lose their living. A smuggler turns up: pay him and he will take them all to France, where there is work. The families sell everything they own and set off. He abandons them in Rome and vanishes. The rest of the way they have to walk themselves, north, toward the Alpine passes under snow. Pietro Germi directs, and the screenplay is by Germi together with Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli. Raf Vallone leads. A hundred minutes. It won the grand jury prize at Berlin in 1951, and is among the most direct things Italian neorealism wrote about migration.