Shoeshine

Shoeshine (Sciuscià, 1946) is available to watch online on iFILM — a neorealist drama by Vittorio De Sica following two shoeshine boys on the streets of postwar Rome. Italy, 91 minutes.

Pasquale and Francesco scrape together coins dreaming of buying a horse together. One risky errand lands them inside a juvenile detention facility, and what unfolds there has nothing to do with crime. It is a portrait of how a system — indifferent, bureaucratic, grinding — takes apart a friendship that poverty and war never could.

In 1948 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created an honorary foreign-film prize specifically to recognize this picture — the first such award in Oscar history. De Sica shot on location in Rome's rubble and cast non-professional boys he found on the street, a method that would become a blueprint for European realism. There are films that age into museum pieces. This one stays raw. Stream Shoeshine (1946) on iFILM.