1946 Italian film
Shoeshine (Italian: Sciuscià [ʃuʃˈʃa], from Neapolitan pronunciation of the English) is a 1946 Italian film directed by Vittorio De Sica. Sometimes regarded as his first masterpiece, the film follows two shoeshine boys who get into trouble with the police after trying to find the money to buy a horse. In 2008, Shoeshine was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978."
Shoeshine became the first film to win the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 20th Academy Awards in 1947.
Film critic Pauline Kael summed up the power of the film by saying "if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?" and equated it to music by Mozart had he written an opera set in poverty.
Plot summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.