La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles)

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La Terra Trema recounts the struggle of a fishing family to escape from poverty and exploitation. In 1947, Visconti went to Sicily, with a small amount of capital advanced by the Communist Party, to make what was initially to have been a short documentary. He stayed there for six months, and the project gradually expanded in scale until what was proposed became a mammoth epic on the conditions of the poor workers and peasants and their struggle to liberate themselves from oppression.