A landmark of humanist filmmaking, Bicycle Thieves was a key work in the 1940s film movement known as Italian neo-realism. Like the wartime trilogy that Roberto Rossellini began with Rome: Open City (1945), it heralded a new kind of cinematic naturalism, employing non-professionals as actors and taking the camera out onto the streets to faithfully record the social realities of a Europe struggling to get back on its feet after WWII.

Adapted from a novel by Luigi Bartolini, the quiet tragedy of a father’s desperate hunt for a stolen bicycle that he depends on for his work has a fable-like simplicity. For all its vivid documentation of a downtrodden Rome, it is as a universal tale of human striving that De Sica’s film has proved influential.

“Bicycle Thieves not only embodies both aesthetically and politically the most important features of the Italian neorealist movement but also, with De Sica’s use of non-professional actors, social engagement and firm roots in the fabric of society, paved the way for hybridity in film and therefore the so-called ‘cinema of the real’.” Nico Marzano

“This painfully beautiful chronicle of life in post-World War II Rome salvages views of rundown streets, poverty and injustice with such precision and simplicity that the emotional punch of the finale is unparalleled.” Kaya Genç

“The gold standard for all human films about inequality.” Andrei Liimets

Film	Year	Director
Buongiorno, notte	2003	Marco Bellocchio
The Intruder	2004	Claire Denis
Holy Motors	2012	Léos Carax
Bicycle Thieves	1948	Vittorio De Sica
Sunset	2018	László Nemes
On the Beach	1959	Stanley Kramer
The Age of Innocence	1993	Martin Scorsese
The Conformist	1970	Bernardo Bertolucci
There Will Be Blood	2007	Paul Thomas Anderson
The Apartment	1960	Billy Wilder

Roberta Ciabarra

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