Germany, Year Zero (1948)

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 favourite of his works, next to his magnificent 'The Flowers of St. Francis'.