Giuseppe De Santis’ Bitter Rice (1949), one of the most provocative and influential films of Italian neorealism, will screen at Film Forum from January 30 through February 5 in a newly restored 4K edition.
Set during planting season in Northern Italy’s Po Valley, Bitter Rice follows a group of rice-field workers known as the mondine, focusing on an earthy laborer played by Silvana Mangano who becomes entangled with a small-time criminal, portrayed by Vittorio Gassman, and his glamorous accomplice, played by Doris Dowling. The film blends social realism with melodrama, pairing its portrait of grueling manual labor with sex, crime, and moral tension.
Filmed on location with real mondine visible in the background, Bitter Rice stands out even within neorealism for its raw physicality and pulp energy. The film was an early international success for producer Dino De Laurentiis, premiered at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival, and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Story the following year.
De Santis, who came up as a critic and screenwriter before directing, was deeply shaped by anti-Fascist film culture in Italy and by his collaborations with figures like Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini. Bitter Rice reflects that background, merging political consciousness with a visceral, almost sensational style that helped broaden the reach of neorealism beyond strictly austere realism.
The new 4K restoration offers a rare chance to see Bitter Rice with renewed visual clarity, restoring the texture and immediacy of a film that helped redefine postwar European cinema, and remains strikingly modern in its mix of social critique and genre filmmaking.
