Twelve-year-old Edmund – the oldest kid to survive – works to support his whole family including his sick bedridden father while the remains of what was a thousand-year empire lies in rubbles around them.

– I don't go to school anymore.

– Why not? You don't like the new teachers?

– I have to work now.

Following Roma città aperta (1945) and Paisà (1946) of #Rossellini's unofficial war trilogy.

In mere hours, a disaster involving a bus and a truck is bound to happen. The story meanders from the bus passengers to the truck drivers, while the road stretches out before them.

In the summer of 1945, the people of a small Japanese village find a Black American helicopter pilot in one of their traps and lock him in the communal storeroom. While the war continues and the villagers wait for orders from above, the man – for the townspeople, his presence, this allegory – becomes something else.

“Your keeping this animal has meant all of us suffer!”

飼育 shares more than a few themes with Đorđe Kadijević's Празник from 1967. The war's the same, any war is, and the Chetniks too capture a Black American pilot. Again, the villagers seem to share a folie, a madness, rooted in an unshaken belief – call it tradition or shared illusions foolishness or hope.

A car accident.

An escape of sorts, in love and lust.

“He puts his cheek to the wall. With a kiss he licks the vertical surface and the greedy plaster sucks in his saliva. Then a shower of kisses.”

– Jean Genet, Notre-Dame des Fleurs (1942/43)

“Even you, Ear, can't listen in the toilet!”

– Ludvik

Auld Lang Syne is sung on Burns Night (Scotland)

“On old long syne my Jo, On old long syne, That thou canst never once reflect, On old long syne”

– Robert Burns, Auld Lang Syne (1788)

“That very night I found myself in totally different circumstances.”

– Don Roque Busqueros