Year			1982
Original title			La Notte Di San Lorenzo
Original lang.			Italian
Country			Italy
Genre			Drama
Length			1:46
Director			Paolo Taviani Vittorio Taviani
Writer			Paolo Taviani Vittorio Taviani
Company			United Artists Classics
Starring			Margarita Lozano Claudio Bigagli Miriam Guidelli Massimo Bonetti Enrica Maria Modugno Sabina Vannucchi Show more... Margarita Lozano Claudio Bigagli Miriam Guidelli Massimo Bonetti Enrica Maria Modugno Sabina Vannucchi Giorgio Naddi Renata Zamengo Micol Guidelli Massimo Sarchielli Giovanni Guidelli Mario Spallino Paolo Hendel

Winner of a Special Jury Prize at Cannes, the Tavianis immensely popular Night of the Shooting Stars is a warm, fanciful film inspired by the directors own experiences as children during the war. Its pretext is storytelling itself: On a starry night, a young mother lulls her infant child to sleep with a bedtime story culled from memories of her own childhood. In 1944, when she was six years old, the people of her Nazi-controlled village had fled their homes and attempted to reach the advancing Americans, rumoured to be but a few miles away. The night was August 10th, the Night of San Lorenzo (hence the original Italian title) a night, Tuscan folklore has it, when every shooting star grants a wish. The film's aesthetic is not the neorealism of a Rossellini but the magic realism of an Italo Calvino or a Garcia Marquez, with frequent stylizations meant to suggest the perceptions of a six-year-old or the exaggerations and embellishments accumulated over forty years of collective memory.