Screening of the film: Rocco and His Brothers

The definitive film on internal immigration within Italy, inspired by Ponte della Ghisolfa by Giovanni Testori, with a screenplay written by Visconti with Suso Cecchi d’Amico and Vasco Pratolini. The widow Rosaria moves from Lucania to Milan with four of her five sons. The fifth, Vincenzo, already lives up north and the arrival of relatives from the south ruins the party celebrating his engagement to the beautiful Ginetta. A powerful and moving story about poverty and cold, passions and violence, the hardships of living and integrating into the Milan of the boom years, which needs labourers but has no intention of entering into dialogue with people it views as “foreigners”. Every character searches for his own path, his identity: one boxes, another works on the Alfa Romeo production line, all united and with similar origins, all divided and on different journeys. A rites of passage story across different strands, Rocco and His Brothers (1960) is a perfect Polaroid of the past, which is surprisingly current. Introduced by Paola Jacobbi.