"This is another film my grandfather showed me at a very young age. It was one of the first times I ever saw reality unfold like that on-screen. The more I watch it, the more that different things pop out. When I was young, this was the first time I ever saw an interaction between an African American and a young Italian kid—and that was big for me, because when I was in Italy my mother was always the only African American around and I was this young Italian kid. So seeing both these cultures represented, and seeing the way they’re represented, made me realize cinema could reflect life—that it’s not just about entertainment, that it can be about something very real. When you really think about the postwar years, the image of Italy was very much constructed through Rossellini films. In the era of Fascism, people like Rossellini and the partisan movement were silenced, so it’s not that they didn’t exist—it’s just that they weren’t allowed to be as vocal because their lives were at stake. The fact that he gave a voice to this movement, showing that Italy did in fact have this fiercely anti-Fascist side that suffered as much as anyone, I think was very important for how Italy has been seen in the postwar years. It’s one of those rare moments when a director has this deeply personal film to make that also coincides with one of the biggest events in world history. I’m definitely drawn to this tradition of filmmaking because I grew up on these films as much as I grew up on Disney."

"All of my favourite films are approaching realism in a different way. This is Italian neorealism – obviously there’s a script and a story and everything, but it’s shot in the street and it has the feel of Italy, of being in the streets and, like Idaho, a deceivingly, simply constructed narrative. But there’s so much emotion that’s evoked from these very simple stories."

"For instance, A Tree of Wooden Clogs, which would have to be one of my favorite films. A year in the life of a peasant commune in Italy — again, it’s poor souls living through a year, so you’re getting a sense of seasons and hardship and community, and a simple, very basic deprived existence. I think that’s a masterpiece, that film."

"The only novel really to do anything true with the waves of revolt in Italy in the mid and late 1970s (until I wrote mine, heh). The voice here is transfixing. The end is so incredibly moving. You will need to adapt to Balestrini’s style of forgoing punctuation, but once you do, you’ll be riding a bike with no hands on the bars and you won’t even notice that you, too, are doing something new."