FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE THE BEST MOVIES IN OUR VIDEO STORE PT.11! Vittorio De Sica - Shoeshine (engl. subt.) 

What to do? Like every evening at home, you sit in front of the TV with lots of sweets. The task: Find a stream on amazon. But: No result. All just cheap junk. The night is over until you find something in this programme, which would have made every village's video store proud in 1982. And netflix? Their own feature films still seem so strangely unfinished. Produced by copy & paste, but without the great art of staging, for which one would actually have spent money at the box office. And series? No, today it should simply be a good film. So here is our alternative: A great film that will touch you, move you to tears and even more, change your whole life a little bit.

Vittorio de Sica's films deal with the tragedy of everyday life. About pain - but also about the beauty of life! If you know de Sica as an actor, you will be surprised how this attractive man, who loves to be the cavalier in sentimental love comedies, could become one of the greatest tragic filmmakers ever? One thing, however, you will notice when you see de Sica's neo-realist films twice: just like his light comedies, his social dramas are great audience films! Basically, de Sica adopted a lot of what he had learned as an actor in his directing work. There is this famous statement of de Sica that EVERYONE is able to play at least one role: Yourself. That's why de Sica instructed amateur actors. Later he was to shoot with real stars, but de Sica's early films with non-actors touch me most. His extraordinary films of the 1940s and early 1950s - the phase they called neorealism. I translate Neorealism primarily as showing social injustice. Of course there are more principles, but that would become "scientific" at this point... The recourse to amateur actors is surely born out of necessity. In Italy after the war there was no money for such social dramas, just like today. But it also results from a simple equation: If there are only about 50 film stars who are cast again and again - how could they be able to portray the lives of so many? When we once screened de Sica in our small cinema, the audience was really excited. Completely thrilled! Sure, because de Sica doesn't present the misery of this world in a documentary way, but rather in the form of a poetic poem. Shoeshine is at heart - like de Sica's other neo-realist films - a masterpiece about how communication fails. Everything begins with an illusion. Then two boys, two friends, are placed in different cells in prison. They are separated. In this way each loses trust in the other. The language fails, they no longer understand each other. Man achieves nothing with words! Everyone stands alone and isolated from the others in the world. Does this remind you of our present Corona time today? It reminds me a lot! Everyone, caught in his loneliness, asks for donations and loans or support. But no help comes. Winning or persuading others fails. No charity, no sympathy. Characters like the boys in Shoeshine exist all around us. But they are ignored by us. They are invisible. The lack of what would be a small amount of money for us drives them to despair. Through the art of de Sica, such people are made visible for the duration of a film! And what happens to de Sica's heroes? They are often forced to make moral compromises. That means they become exactly what they condemn. In Shoeshine they develop into murderers and traitors. They simply suffer too much to become heroes or even saints. P.S. The sadness in Shoeshine is not inevitable. It is a consequence of the social structure.