One of the director's three favourites of his own works, PAISAN is "considered to be Rossellini's most important film, and in a way it is the most impressive film of the entire neorealist movement" (Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present). PAISAN had a galvanic effect on the subsequent generation of Italian filmmakers: the Taviani brothers, Ermanno Olmi, and Gillo Pontecorvo, among others, credit the film for having convinced them of cinema's worth and power. Its might is undiminished, and few will come away unmoved. A six-episode work, written by Federico Fellini and Rossellini, PAISAN recreates the last days of WWII in Italy, moving from south (Sicily) to north (the Po Valley), as the American army drives out the Nazis. The first segment is a shocking tale about an American soldier, "Joe from Jersey," and his brief, doomed friendship with a young Sicilian woman. The next is set in the rubble of Naples, where a local shoeshine boy steals the boots of a black American soldier who is drunk. The third takes place in Rome, where another inebriated G. I. recounts to a prostitute the story of his search for an innocent girl he encountered on the day of Liberation. In the thrilling fourth story, an American nurse and her Italian friend make their way through a dangerous, divided Florence and across the Arno river - she to her lover, a partisan Capo, he to his family. The fifth episode, about Franciscan monks praying for the "lost souls" of two Americans they have taken in for the night - one a Protestant, another a Jew - is a brief respite of gentle comedy before the onslaught of the sixth and final story, the most famous and grimmest in PAISAN, a stark recounting of