Italian Neorealism is a postwar italian film movement using non-professional actors, location shooting, and stories of ordinary people in hard times.
Italian Neorealism flourished from roughly 1945 to 1952, in the rubble of postwar Italy. Roberto Rossellini's 'Roma città aperta' (Rome, Open City, 1945), shot under occupation with scarce film stock and improvised lighting, opened the movement. Vittorio De Sica's 'Ladri di biciclette' (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), about an unemployed father searching for the bicycle he needs to keep his job, became its most beloved film. The neorealists rejected studio polish, professional stars, and tidy narratives in favour of natural light, real locations, non-actors playing themselves, and stories drawn from working-class life. Cesare Zavattini, the movement's principal screenwriter and theorist, dreamed of a cinema that could spend ninety minutes on an ordinary woman buying a pair of shoes. Neorealism's influence was global: it shaped the French New Wave, Iranian cinema from Abbas Kiarostami onward, the Brazilian Cinema Novo, and the Dardenne brothers' contemporary social realism.