“Undeniably the most important neorealist film after Rossellini’s Open City...”
As chosen by TPFC members as part of the TPFC 10th Anniversary Celebrations!
The second film ever screened at our film club, back in August 2012.
Set in a post-War post-Fascist Rome suffering from a depressed economy (sound familiar?) Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) gets the only job available to him: pasting up movie posters. But on Antonio’s first day of work his bicycle is stolen. Needing his bike in order to work, Antonio and his young son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) scour the streets of Rome in an increasingly desperate search for the lost bike… Eschewing studios and famous actors for real locations and non-professional actors who lived the lives they were playing, Bicycle Thieves helped define the neorealist movement: a small period of Italian film-making that focused on simple, humanist stories, of which Bicycle Thieves was one of the most captivating and moving.
