1948
Rating - 4 out of 5 stars
An amazing, beautiful Italian film that's sort of a neorealist docu-drama. It's a fictional story, but just barely, and it's filmed with actors who are non-actors who are all really residents of the small poor and hard coastal village where the film takes place.
There's one scene in particular that's among my favourite film scenes of all time. The village is based on fishing, and so the men and even the young and little boys must go out on dangerous fishing expeditions daily and get very little money for it and put their lives at risk, being that the waters here are unfriendly, rocky and turbulent.
There's a bad storm, and some of the main characters' boat doesn't return when it should. The women in the family, old and young, walk in black to the huge rocks and boulders at the shore and walk/climb to the edge to look out to the sea and there they stand in the wind, stark and sad, hoping for a return ship.
It reminds me of sort of a reverse scene from the Iliad, where Achilles' sea goddess mother Thetis and her sisters walk and rise from the waves to the shore to mourn.
What's especially potent about the scene is knowing that the actors are real poor people from that area, who may really do this and who may really have done this before. I don't know if pictures will do it justice. Truly magnificent scene.
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