Germania anno zero

A soldier can lose everything but his courage.

72 Mins
1948
it

star7.7/ 10

In the ruins of post-WWII Berlin, a twelve-year-old boy is left to his own devices in order to help provide for his family.

Cast & Crew

Edmund Moeschke

Edmund

Ernst Pittschau

Il Padre

Ingetraud Hinze

Eva

Franz-Otto Krüger

Karl-Heinz

Erich Gühne

Il maestro

Heidi Blänkner

Frau Rademaker

Review

talisencrw

What an awful position the despicable Nazis left their descendants at the close of the Second World War. 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 'survivors'. A very sad film to watch, yet at the very same time necessary and healing. Clearly my favourite of his works, next to his magnificent 'The Flowers of St. Francis'.

CinemaSerf

Edmund Moeschke ("Edmund") is superb in this gritty and authentic looking post-war story of a young boy struggling, with his family, to make ends meet in Berlin after the fall of the Nazis. Scrounging, scrimping, scavenging - all to try and keep his ailing father and the rest of his family fed and warm. It is tightly cast and the scenarios - filmed just three years after the allies reduced much of the city to rubble are very poignant; the photography and sparing dialogue all lend well to the gently accumulating sense of desperation that culminates in tragedy. The children bring optimism and hope to the story - their innocence writ large as they embark on a new life for them as did the rest of Europe in 1948. Well worth a watch.

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