Film > World Cinema - Classic

Paolo Pasolini's (Accatone, Salo) neorealist masterpiece stars the great Anna Magnani (Open City) as a middle-aged whore who saves money to buy an apartment, a fruit stand and retire from working the streets of Rome. She soon brings her beloved teenage son Ettore from the country to live with her; but Ettore quickly succumbs to the corrupting influence of the city, falling in with local gangs and developing a fatal crush on a disreputable girl. Wanting to make Ettore an honest man while rebuilding her own life, Mamma Roma’s greatest challenge is her past, which inevitably comes back to haunt her. Declared obscene when it premièred at the 1962 Venice International Film Festival, Mamma Roma was heavily censored on release, and now comes to DVD as Pasolini intended. In the neorealist tradition of Luchino Visconti and Vittorio de Sica, this tough, streetwise film explores the lives of the poor and marginalised in the mean streets of post-war Rome, and launched Pasolini’s infamous film career.