Bambini in città is Comencini’s first official film, following a single amateur short in 16mm, La donzelletta, which was lost during the war. On the surface, this documentary provides a timely dose of neorealism: children amongst the ruins, as in the films of De Sica and Rossellini. Shoeshine and Paisan were produced during the same months; Bicycle Thieves and Germany Year Zero were still to come.
The narrator’s voice adopts a tone curiously lacking in rhetoric, while the beginning and ending reveal the gaze of an architect and town planner. Ruins are also a place of freedom. Amongst fairs, little theatres, amusement fairs, meadows and clearings, the Lampwicks and Pinocchios of the post-war years go in search of a world between the city and the countryside that the director would never forsake.