The Children are Watching Us

Vittorio De Sica (Italy)

PRESENTED WITH VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

To round out your PuSh Festival experience, we offer a selection of films inspired by, and intended to be paired with, performances and artists in the 2019 PuSh program. Here, in our partnership with VIFF, the darkened cinema matches the darkened theatre in illuminating and surprising ways.

Five years before Bicycle Thieves, director De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini collaborated for the first time (along with three other writers) on this heartbreaking tale of a family breakup witnessed through the eyes of a child. Shot in 1942 under the fascist regime, the film broke with the pieties of the time by acknowledging the tensions that can tear apart a marriage. As Zavattini remarked, the film marked “the most important stage in my evolution as a filmmaker… and as a human being. Through the character of the child, we felt for the first time a human being… all my previous characters felt like puppets.”

Paired with Joelysa Pankanea’s Bicycle Thieves.