Shoeshine 4K UHD + Blu-ray
'Shoeshine' Director: Vittorio De Sica (1946) Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray | Italian w/ English subtitles
An international breakthrough for neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s (Bicycle Thieves) Academy Award–winning film is an indelible fable of innocence lost amid the hardscrabble reality of 1940s Italy.
On the streets of Rome, two boys set out to raise the money to buy a horse by shining shoes. When they are inadvertently caught up in a robbery and sent to a brutal juvenile detention center, their loyalty to each other is severely tested.
A devastating portrait of economic struggle made all the more haunting by its child’s-eye perspective, Shoeshine stands as one of the defining achievements of postwar Italian filmmaking.
Special features include:
- Sciuscià 70 (2016), a documentary by Mimmo Verdesca, made to mark the film’s seventieth anniversary
- New program on Shoeshine and Italian neorealism featuring film scholars Paola Bonifazio and Catherine O’Rawe
- Radio broadcast from 1946 featuring director Vittorio De Sica
- Essay by film scholar David Forgacs and “Shoeshine, Joe?,” a 1945 photo-documentary by De Sica
