Synopsis
Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945) is Roberto Rossellini's war drama you can watch online on iFILM. It unfolds in the Italian capital during the winter the Germans still held the streets while the underground was already fighting back.
Engineer Giorgio Manfredi, a Resistance organizer, is on the run from the Gestapo and desperate for a way out. The people who shelter him have little left to lose: a printer, his fiancée Pina (Anna Magnani), and parish priest Don Pietro, who smuggles cash and weapons beneath his cassock. Every move could be the last. Patrols sweep the courtyards, informers loiter by the doorways, and the torture inside the German command post is shown with no glamour at all.
Rossellini shot it almost as soon as the Wehrmacht pulled out, on leftover film stock and real streets. The coarse grain and untrained faces became a manifesto, the spark of Italian neorealism. The film took the top prize at Cannes in 1946. Stream Rome, Open City (1945) online on iFILM.
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