Paisan

Paisan follows the Allied advance through Italy during the Second World War, from the landings in Sicily in 1943 to the fighting in the north as German forces retreat. The film tells its story through six separate episodes set in different places, among them Naples, Rome, Florence and the Po delta, each showing meetings between American soldiers and Italian civilians in a country divided and occupied. The episodes range from a young Sicilian girl guiding a patrol to a soldier's encounter with poverty in Naples, the search for a loved one across a split Florence, and a partisan struggle in the north. Together they trace the campaign as a series of encounters rather than a single narrative.

Roberto Rossellini directed and produced, working from a screenplay he wrote with Federico Fellini and Sergio Amidei. It came directly after Rome, Open City in his filmography, ahead of Germany, Year Zero and the features that followed through the 1950s and beyond. The cast mixes performers such as Carmela Sazio and Robert Van Loon with soldiers playing versions of themselves, a method that gives the film a documentary-like texture.

Released in Italy in December 1946, the film runs 125 minutes. It holds a rating of 7.5 out of 10 on TMDB from 364 votes, and a critics' rating of 8.3 out of 10 from 13 reviews, placing the critics notably higher than the wider public on IMDb-scale terms.