Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice)

In conjunction with the exhibition NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy, 1932-1960

Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice)
(Italy, 1949, 109 min.)
In ITALIAN with ENGLISH subtitles

Directed by Giuseppe De Santis
Starring Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman, Doris Dowling

Introduced by Jenny McPhee, NYU.

In Northern Italy’s Po Valley, an earthy rice-field worker (Silvana Mangano) falls in with a small-time criminal (Vittorio Gassman), who with his girlfriend (Doris Dowling) is planning a daring heist of the crop. Released in 1949, Bitter Rice is both a socially conscious look at field workers’ hardships and a melodrama of sex and violence—neorealism with a dose of pulp, enhanced by meticulously choreographed tracking shots by director Giuseppe De Santis and cinematographer Otello Martelli, whose other credits included Rossellini’s Paisà and Stromboli and Fellini’s La strada and La dolce vita. Criterion Collection.

Co-sponsored with Center for Applied Liberal Arts, School of Professional Studies; Grey Art Gallery. Co-presented by The Criterion Collection.