Description:Sophia Loren won a much-deserved Academy Award for her performance in this 1960 classic by neo-realist filmmaker Vittorio de Sica. A last-minute substitute for Anna Magnani, Loren reached deep within her own memories of wartime experiences for her portrait of a widow struggling to survive in battle-scarred Italy along with a teenage dSophia Loren won a much-deserved Academy Award for her performance in this 1960 classic by neo-realist filmmaker Vittorio de Sica. A last-minute substitute for Anna Magnani, Loren reached deep within her own memories of wartime experiences for her portrait of a widow struggling to survive in battle-scarred Italy along with a teenage daughter (Eleonora Brown). The film begins with both women sharing romantic feelings toward a young man (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a story line disrupted by the ravages of World War II and the horrifying rape of both mother and daughter in a church by Allied Moroccan soldiers. The aftermath of this atrocity finds both characters dealing with even more, varying shades of grief, as the war seems to sap all that they had treasured and leaves them with only the bare bones of their emotional and physical survival. De Sica's capacity to render tragedy both with the starkest of strokes and the most delicate of emotions has never been more impressive than in this film, and Loren's shatteringly honest portrayal is a watershed in movie history. --Tom Keogh... (more)(less)
"Cesira and her 13-year-old daughter, Rosetta, flee from the allied bombs in Rome during the second world war. They travel to the village where Cesira was born. During their journey and in the village, the mother does everything to protect Rosetta. During their stay in the village, a young intellectual, Michele falls in love with Cesira who does not know how to reply to the advances of such a gentleman. Extremely cruel events rattles Cesira but Rosetta is even more lost in the end.
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"Sophia Loren
Loren can lay claim to the fact that she was the first person to win an acting Oscar for a foreign language performance for her work as shopkeeper Cesira, a single mother struggling to get her daughter out of World War II ravaged Rome. Known primarily for her sex-kitten roles in the states, Loren forever broke out of the type-casting rut that plagued her early career by playing courageous in the face of the soul-killing roadblocks. An unflinching look at the horrors of war that flit"
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