Germany, Year Zero

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 favou…

CinemaSerf

July 9, 2022

7/10

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 gen…