In this crushing final entry of his neorealist War Trilogy, Roberto Rossellini shifts focus from the fight against fascism in Rome, Open City and Paisan, to the hopeless struggle for survival in postwar Allied-occupied Berlin, all from the eyes of a child. Living on meagre rations in a bombed-out apartment with his bedridden father and two adult siblings, twelve-year-old Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) wanders about the obliterated city hoping to pull his weight. As he gets dragged into blackmarket schemes and led astray by his predatory Nazi-sympathising school teacher, Edmund’s good intentions wind up backfiring at every turn.

A bleak portrait of Berlin still in ruins, an exhausted people’s struggle to carry on, a nation conflicted and confused in the wake of defeat, and of a child running out of hope in an adult’s world; Germany, Year Zero bares witness to humanity in the devastating fallout of war. Focusing on the plight of a young boy, this entry is perhaps Rossellini’s most personal, dedicated to the memory of his son Marco Romano, who had recently passed away from appendicitis. Despite never performing for a film before or since, Edmund Moeschke, a circus acrobat cast for his likeness to Romano, is the heart and soul of this tragedy; his forlorn wanderings resound as one of cinema’s most heartbreaking images.