Film Box: Miracle in Milan + Adoption

Description:
Renowned filmmaker Vittorio De Sica followed up his international triumph Bicycle Thieves with this enchantingly playful neorealist fairy tale, in which he combines his celebrated slice-of-life poetry with flights of graceful comedy and storybook fantasy. On the outskirts of Milan, a band of vagabonds work together to form a shantytown. When it is discovered that the land they occupy contains oil, however, it’s up to the cherubic orphan Totò (Francesco Golisano)—with some divine help—to save their community from greedy developers. Tipping their hats to the imaginative whimsy of Charles Chaplin and René Clair, De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, adapting his own novel, craft a bighearted ode to the nobility of everyday people.

 SPECIAL FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interview with neorealism expert and film scholar David Forgacs
- Audio interview from the late 1960s in which director Vittorio De Sica looks back on his career, conducted by film critic Gideon Bachmann
- Interviews with actor Brunella Bovo and Manuel De Sica, the director’s son
- Feature-length documentary from 2019 on screenwriter Cesare Zavattini
- Trailers
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Christina Newland and, on the Blu-ray, “Totò il buono,” a 1940 treatment by Zavattini that is the earliest version of the story on which Miracle in Milan is based
- New cover by Manule Fior

Description
Trailblazing auteur Márta Mészáros gives aching expression to the experiences of women in 1970s Hungary in this sensitive and absorbing drama, which became the first film directed by a woman to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Through intimate camera work, Adoption immerses the viewer in the worlds of two women, each searching for fulfillment: Kata (Katalin Berek), a middle-aged factory worker who wants to have a child with her married lover, and Anna (Gyöngyvér Vígh), a teenage ward of the state determined to emancipate herself in order to marry her boyfriend. The bond that forms between the two speaks quietly but powerfully to the social and political forces that shape women’s lives, as each navigates the realities of love, marriage, and motherhood in her quest for self-determination.

SPECIAL FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration undertaken by the National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive, supervised by cinematographer Lajos Koltai and approved by director Márta Mészáros, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New video essay by scholar Catherine Portuges
- Interview with Mészáros from 2019
- Blow-Ball, a 1964 short film by Mészáros
- Márta Mészáros: Portrait of the Hungarian Filmmaker, a 1979 documentary by Katja Raganelli featuring on-set interviews with the director and creative collaborators
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: An essay by film scholar Elena Gorfinkel
- New cover by Katya Mezhibovskaya

For anyone who thinks "Art Cinema is Boring". The Film Box challenges this notion by demystifying the work of the best filmmakers, by creating a context within which to view them.

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