While certainly best-known for Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica’s vast, varied body of work is worth diving into. This June, those in NYC can experience quite a taste of it with four films by the director at Film at Lincoln Center’s Sophia Loren retrospective, immediately followed by the release of the new 4K restoration of Shoeshine at Film Forum. Restored by The Film Foundation and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata, in association with Orium S.A. Restoration, the new trailer from Janus Films has now arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “One of the greatest achievements in the cinematic revolution known as Italian neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine stands as a timeless masterpiece of trenchant social observation and stirring emotional humanism. In postwar Rome, street kids Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) shine the shoes of American servicemen in hopes of saving enough money to purchase a beautiful horse. But when Giuseppe’s criminal brother tricks them into participating in a confidence scam, the duo are arrested and then ground through the merciless gears of the juvenile detention system until their once-unbreakable friendship becomes the first casualty in an inexorable sequence of tragic events. Scripted by an all-star team of screenwriters (led by neorealist legend Cesare Zavattini), and directed by De Sica with an uncompromising eye for the period’s singular personalities and harsh conditions, Shoeshine is filmmaking at its most soulful, urgent, and heartbreakingly beautiful.”
Watch the trailer below.
