GIUSEPPE DE SANTIS

Giuseppe De Santis (February 11, 1917 - May 16, 1997) was an Italian film director. One of the most idealistic neorealistic filmmakers of the 1940s, he made films punctuated by ardent cries for social reform

He was first a student of philosophy and literature before entering Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. While working as a journalist for Cinema magazine, De Santis became a major proponent of the early neorealist filmmakers who were trying to make films that mirrored the simple often tragic realities of proletariat life using location shooting and nonprofessional casts


De Santis unites a cinema instinct of the highest order and a deep directing wisdom. In Tragic Hunt (1947), Bitter rice (1949), No peace under the olive trees (1950) he transfuses his curiosities for a rural world, theater of conflicts and tensions represented in the characterizing key of an adjourned and sophisticated fiction of appendix, soaked of democratic contents. Bitter rice marks the explosion of an erotic bomb in the Italian cinema, Silvana Mangano, in whose footsteps a squad of florid and seductive beauties , defined curvaceous women because of their attributes, will oust the stars' dominion survived to the war uproars.