everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

What an awful position the despicable Nazis left their descendants at the close of the Second World War. Roberto Rossellini has the perfect, objective, almost documentarian painterly hand in his depiction of this, and I have the feeling that only someone from one of the losing Axis countries, such as he, could so astutely and profoundly bring across such a feeling of loss and guilt that haunted these so-called 'survivors'. A very sad film to watch, yet at the very same time necessary and healing. Clearly my favourite of Rossellini's works, next to his magnificent 'The Flowers of St. Francis', just a few years later on and decidedly different in atmosphere.

By the time the Second World War ended and the neorealist movement grew large, Roberto Rossellini was wrapping up his little so-called "war trilogy" with Germany Year Zero (1948). Shot entirely in Germany, the film deals with a boy struggling to grow up in a post-war Berlin along with his family. Every moment in this film is like seeing the reality of going through a life-changing experience on how you live & deal with those problems, but also leaves you both moved & stunned after having to see it the first time. Edmund Meschke's performance as little Edmund (the film's protagonist) is memorable and heartbreaking by how his character portrays in this story, while Robert Jullard's cinematography is masterfully crafted by its long takes & realistic feels with some music by Renzo Rossellini fitting in the moods. This film is one of Rossellini's most personal because his son died young while working on his trilogy and then he created Edmund for which is the main character being focused on besides other things in that world. What is even more interesting was the fact that Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) was also released the same year Germany, Year Zero came out so both films were perfect for that era because neorealism was already becoming cinema's next art. In 2002, acclaimed filmmaker Michael Haneke named this classic as one of his ten all- time favorite films for Sight & Sound's Greatest Films Poll, which is awesome to describe the film's impact after its first release. So far I can say about this postwar drama: "Wow." Even greater than Rome, Open City (1944) (which I have seen, too) but better & far more moving.My Rating: 5/5

The last of Roberto Rossellini's 'War Trilogy' movies and it couldn't have been better. The movie is filmed in the backdrop of an obliterated Berlin where the survivors of the war fight for survival. The center character is that of a boy who makes a futile attempt to get a job and make money and keep his family of 4 meet the bills. They live at the mercy of the Rademakers. The boy, having failed to get a job, meets his former teacher who makes the boy trade his goods to the Americans. The boy befriends a girl, who despite being in her early teens, solicit to make a living(though not explicitly shown). The women in his house, his sister and the daughters of the Rademakers too date the Americans to earn a little money. The gullible boy gets persuaded by his pedophile teacher to end the life of his ailing father, how only the fittest deserve to survive; plants a sapling in the brain of the boy the Nazi principle of eugenics. The boy poisons his father to his death. After having realized what heinous crime he had committed, the boy commits suicide due to guilt.The movie is well-written and the director's attempt to bring to the silver screen the struggle of those who'd lived through the war only to live in dilapidated buildings, no fixed job, no steady income and stricken by poverty is laudable.

Young Edmund and his family live in the bombed out ruins of post-war Germany. Cramped into one house with four other families, without electricity or food they struggle to survive. His mother did not survive the war, his father is slowly dying, and his brother is in hiding to escape the Russian camps. Since Edmund is too young to legally work, they all depend on his older sister to survive. Edmund is troubled by the burden he puts on his sister, trying to be the man his brother does not have the guts to be and thus he is out looking for ways to make money. A former teacher (and possible paedophile) helps him make some quick cash by selling Nazi memorabilia to American soldiers. The money is not enough and Edmund's father is getting worse. Following a conversation with his former teacher, Edmund tries to do the right thing and out of love, poisons his father to set him free. The images of the real life landscapes are extremely powerful, and young Edmund Moeschke gives one of the best performances I have seen from a child actor, the rest of the cast and dialogues are a bit stiff at parts. An honest and shocking portrayal of the best and worst of humanity. (10/10)