Based on director Luchino Visconti's vision of a peasant uprising, this haunting film details a Sicilian fishing village's battle to rebuild their post-war society in the face of an exploitative wholesaler. Visconti's purest excursion into neorealism and a masterpiece of post-war Italian cinema, La Terra Trema features striking location photography, an obscure Sicilian dialect, and an entire cast of non-professional actors. It vividly, and beautifully, captures the struggles of a real-life family facing economic abuse, and abuse from the forces of nature in the roiling Mediterranean seas – having mortgaged their home to buy a boat and thus escape their poverty, the family lose everything when the boat is destroyed in a storm. Visconti said of the film: “The story grew from day to day, following the more or less logical order of a scenario that was more often than not suggested to me by the actors themselves.”


Won the Special Prize, Venice Film Festival 1948