La strada

La strada is a 1954 film directed by Federico Fellini. It is the work that gave international notoriety to the director, in 1957 he won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 29th edition, in which this category of the award was established.

Gelsomina, a young and naive girl, is entrusted to Zampanò, a rough wandering acrobat. She is sensitive and always striving to discover the mysterious secrets of nature and things. He, opaque and massive, earthly and animalistic, barely notices what he sees and touches.

Between the two, of course, no communion is possible and Gelsomina suffers so much that she wants to leave. But another wanderer, a tightrope walker called "Il Matto", convinces her of the mysterious secret of his mission near Zampanò. Everything is needed and all men are needed for something - says the Fool - and she "serves" by staying close to Zampanò.

Gelsomina understands and stays, but one day Zampanò, who had never got along with the Fool, gets into a fight with him and, almost without meaning to, kills him. Gelsomina goes crazy with pain, because the Fool, in a certain sense, had been for her the key to all those mysterious secrets that, before knowing him, she had only guessed in nature.

Faced with this madness, Zampanò is stunned and does not know what to do. The day, however, when he realizes that Gelsomina's rambling sentences about the death of the Fool could lead him to prison, he decides to leave the woman while she sleeps.