Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

What an awful position the despicable Nazis left their descendants at the close of the Second World War. Roberto Rossellini has the perfect, objective, almost documentarian painterly hand in his depiction of this, and I have the feeling that only someone from one of the losing Axis countries, such as he, could so astutely and profoundly bring across such a feeling of loss and guilt that haunted these so-called 'survivors'. A very sad film to watch, yet at the very same time necessary and healing. Clearly my favourite of Rossellini's works, next to his magnificent 'The Flowers of St. Francis', just a few years later on and decidedly different in atmosphere.

Young Edmund and his family live in the bombed out ruins of post-war Germany. Cramped into one house with four other families, without electricity or food they struggle to survive. His mother did not survive the war, his father is slowly dying, and his brother is in hiding to escape the Russian camps. Since Edmund is too young to legally work, they all depend on his older sister to survive. Edmund is troubled by the burden he puts on his sister, trying to be the man his brother does not have the guts to be and thus he is out looking for ways to make money. A former teacher (and possible paedophile) helps him make some quick cash by selling Nazi memorabilia to American soldiers. The money is not enough and Edmund's father is getting worse. Following a conversation with his former teacher, Edmund tries to do the right thing and out of love, poisons his father to set him free. The images of the real life landscapes are extremely powerful, and young Edmund Moeschke gives one of the best performances I have seen from a child actor, the rest of the cast and dialogues are a bit stiff at parts. An honest and shocking portrayal of the best and worst of humanity. (10/10)

Roberto Rossellini's grim, though disappointingly flat melodrama Germany, Year Zero opens with a boldly written preface that attempts to make clear the reasons for the movie's existence. Attempting to place the film as something closer to a sociological artifact than a fictional drama, it rambles on about where it was shot, what it aims to do, the tragic location of the production and an implication of humanist ideology.It's not an entirely convincing argument for the film to make, since there's a fair amount of dramatic artifice on display here, and it bares its weakness as insecure with the possibility of differing interpretations, which will happen anyway. Certainly, for someone whose extensive disclaimer emboldens its apparent aim to be completely objective, Rossellini is not being objective in this movie. There's an obvious ideological agenda astir in telling this story of a twelve-year-old German boy who does what he can to simplify his family's suffering in Germany's post-war bane. The director includes a pungent Christian moral that is prompt chiefly so audiences can be expected to have heavy hearts when it becomes distinct that owing to the boy's severe way of life, a strand of faith is not enough to pull him back from the height of condemnation. Rossellini also has no problem using his style to denounce most of his characters. Whatever he might include in the film's opening paragraphs, he is without a doubt cognizant that using an overhead shot or a close-up here has a clear inborn judgmental intention, and he doesn't arrest his style from including such cinematic language. Nothing demands that a film be necessarily impartial, so this one's emphasis on its own objectivity is dubious.Even as Germany Year Zero promotes a definite agenda, it remains admirable, because it forfeits or forgets no technical and storytelling virtues, although . Rather than sets, real locations are used, but the film feels a bit less documentary-like than many other neorealist features. There's a strong sense of structure present in the plotting that makes the events feel more deterministic and less capricious than they should if a breeding of reality was this rubble film's decisive aim. By happy chance, this narrative coarseness comes off like a succession of lamentable twists of fate, and as such it doesn't blister the credibility of the film, even as it makes it feel more like a written piece. Fiction is by no means an art form to feel one is above, so Rossellini's beginning pretense might have more to do with his unwillingness to accept his material for what it is than his lack of understanding as to what he was doing in the film.The cold sober atmosphere that dominates this transparent moral tale never allows the audience to take for granted how agonized conditions were while the movie was being made. The boy's father is withering on his death bed from malnutrition. A trip to a congested hospital is seen as a blessing, not only because it staves off the threat of his death, but because when he's not at home there's one less mouth to feed. Doses of grim truth like that seep past any innate contrivance in the film-making and coarsen the film with a sense of immediacy. It's about the hope of transcending the natural law of survival of the fittest as a way of ennobling the human race.

This movie is a masterpiece. Some other movie critics may tell you better what is neo-realism and such things. I will not do it, instead I will tell you why I liked so much this movie.In the beginning of the movie, the voice of Rosselini says: Something must be done to change what these German kids think of life, or else they will love nobody. The kid (main character) has only seen terror and misery his whole life. Before the end of the war, his father tried to take his name of the Führer youth, but the kid betrayed his father saying that the document was false. He did it because all the society, including his teacher (Herr Enning) was pro-nazism.The housekeeper, Herr Kanengaard says that it would be better the kid's father die, because he is sick. The father says he should die, because he is sick and tired of being a obstacle in their lives. Finally the teacher says that it would be better if the father died, and starts preaching the same concepts that made nazism kill millions of people during the war. That the young and health should eliminate the old and worthless. The stronger must subdue the weaker, that's how nature works. Then the kid poisons his own father. That's what I found genial in the movie, Rosselini shows the perversity of nazism, even after the war, without any cannon or bullet fired, without showing any concentration camp.Later Edmund shows to be just a child, running and playing, and he did only what he was told to do, but now the teacher said he is a monster. He keeps playing and fooling around, but then when he realizes the suffering he would have the burden of his life would be too heavy to carry, he kills himself. That's the time when I shivered and cried.