The legacy of Neorealism: from Italy to Iran

When young Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf - then only 18 - made her debut feature The Apple in 1997, sceptics suspected, condescendingly, that it was the work of her father, long-established director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (who did indeed write and edit that film). He collaborated on Blackboards too, but this film is so different from The Apple and so striking that it can only encourage us to see Samira Makhmalbaf as a very distinctive sensibility, working to develop her own film language with conspicuous success.

There was a time when any self-respecting film-goer would have seen Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves. Now, when many younger film-goers think of Pulp Fiction as prehistoric, that's no longer the case. Yet it's hard to imagine what the history of cinema would look like without Bicycle Thieves. Released in 1948, and immediately heralded as the key document of Italian neorealism (more so even than Roberto Rossellini's earlier Rome, Open City) it's the missing link between Chaplin's The Tramp and the Dardennes brothers' The Child. Generations of filmmakers, from Satyajit Ray in India, Mohsin Makhmalbaf and Samira Makhmalbaf in Iran to Charles Burnett in America, have been captivated and inspired by this enduring testament to the poetry and pathos of working-class life, a passionate depiction of human aspiration in darkened times. Neo-real = real life.