Screening Dates
  • December 18, 2021 8:40
  • December 26, 2021 6:15
  • December 27, 2021 4:00
  • January 5, 2022 6:30
New Restoration

I saw it when I was a child, and somehow it almost changed my life. I wanted to be part of the world … It made me want to be a good person. It really told me it’s important to live, it’s important what you do.”

Liv Ullmann

Once upon a time in postwar Italy … Vittorio De Sica’s follow-up to his international triumph Bicycle Thieves is an enchanting neorealist fairy tale in which he combined his celebrated slice-of-life poetry with flights of graceful comedy and storybook fantasy. On the outskirts of Milan, a band of vagabonds work together to form a shantytown. When it is discovered that the land they occupy contains oil, it’s up to the cherubic orphan Totò (Francesco Golisano)—with some divine help—to save their community from greedy developers. Tipping their hats to the imaginative whimsy of Charles Chaplin and René Clair, De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini (adapting his own novel) craft a big-hearted ode to the nobility of everyday people” (Janus Films). Grand Prize of the Festival, Cannes, 1951. 

New 4K restoration from the original camera by Cineteca di Bologna

An off-beat and entrancing entry in De Sica’s neorealist canon, Miracle in Milan is an extraordinary fable … One of De Sica’s unsung masterpieces.”

Harvard Film Archive

A wildly imaginative tale brought to life with astonishing special effects and slapstick stunts … Fantasy casts a lurid light on unbearable realities in this political comedy by De Sica.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker
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