Christ Stopped At Eboli

Francesco Rosi turns again to a historical figure (he has also filmed the lives of Salvatore Giuliano, Lucky Luciano, and Enrico Mattei) as the basis for this picture. This time Rosi's subject is the anti-Fascist writer-painter Carlo Levi, whose titular autobiographical novel has had worldwide success. The film follows a period in Levi's life of political exile in the tiny southern Italian village of Lucania, a place where Mussolini felt this northern intellectual could do no harm. Levi (Gian Maria Volonte) arrives in the mid-1930s via rail at Eboli, a beautiful peasant town whose simple inhabitants have been kept at a comfortable distance from the Fascist happenin...