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Bitter Rice

(Riso amaro, Giuseppe De Santis, 1949, Italy)

New Restoration

A woman stands looking at a man, behind them many people are leaving a train boxcar.

Straddling the line between earthy melodrama and neorealism, Bitter Rice is one of the key films in Italian film history.

Bitter Rice follows Silvana (Silvana Mangano) and Francesca (Doris Dowling) through the rice paddy fields of Northern Italy’s Po Valley. They are just two of the many underpaid and overworked women hired to work the upcoming harvest, but only Francesca is on the run from the law after stealing a necklace with her boyfriend Walter (Vittorio Gassman). When Walter arrives intent on stealing the harvest, the story quickly turns from social realism into a crime film with a love triangle at the center. In Italian with English subtitles. (109 mins., 4K DCP)

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IMAGE CAPTION
Bitter Rice, courtesy of Janus Films.

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Bitter Rice