Shoeshine - The Criterion Collection
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Release Date: 18/08/2025
An international breakthrough for neorealism, Vittorio De Sica's Academy Award-winning film is an indelible fable of innocence lost amid the hardscrabble reality of 1940s Italy. On the streets of Rome, two boys - best friends Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) - set out to raise the money to buy a horse by shining shoes. When they are inadvertently caught up in a robbery and sent to a brutal juvenile detention centre, their loyalty to each other is severely tested. A devastating portrait of economic struggle made all the more haunting by its child's-eye perspective, Shoeshine stands as one of the defining achievements of postwar Italian filmmaking.