La Notte Di San Lorenzo

Winner of a Special Jury Prize at Cannes, the Tavianis immensely popular Night of the Shooting Stars is a warm, fanciful film inspired by the directors own experiences as children during the war. Its pretext is storytelling itself: On a starry night, a young mother lulls her infant child to sleep with a bedtime story culled from memories of her own childhood. In 1944, when she was six years old, the people of her Nazi-controlled village had fled their homes and attempted to reach the advancing Americans, rumoured to be but a few miles away. The night was August 10th, the Night of San Lorenzo (hence the original Italian title) a night, Tuscan folklore has it, when every shooting star grants a wish. The film's aesthetic is not the neorealism of a Rossellini but the magic realism of an Italo Calvino or a Garcia Marquez, with frequent stylizations meant to suggest the perceptions of a six-year-old or the exaggerations and embellishments accumulated over forty years of collective memory.