The Way We Laughed

Turin, 1958. Two Sicilian brothers have come north. Pietro, the younger, is to study and become a teacher; Giovanni, the elder, cannot read or write and takes whatever work he can find so his brother can keep studying. As the years pass the arrangement inverts. Giovanni learns how to stay on his feet, while Pietro sinks under the life his brother has laid on him. The debt between them leaves neither of them alone, and it ends somewhere neither of them planned. Gianni Amelio directs the Italian film; a hundred and twenty-four minutes, with Enrico Lo Verso and Francesco Giuffrida as the brothers. It is built in six parts, each covering a single day between 1958 and 1964. It won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1998.