Saturday 22 November at 19:00

Drawn by an advertisement offering a typist position, several hundred young women from all over Rome flock to the company’s headquarters. The wait on the steps of the building lasts several hours, and at a certain point, one of the young women attempts to sneak past the others. This causes a violent uproar in the group, and the steps collapse. Many suffer bruises, some are slightly injured, others seriously, while one, despite prompt surgery, dies.

The incident has varied consequences: some young women simply resume their old lives; the middle-class girl who wanted to become independent to follow her boyfriend finds the strength to leave her family; the abused maid returns to her hometown; one of them, pregnant, can no longer hide her condition; the girl who started the fight is called to the police station, but evidently she is not responsible. Synopsis from Venice International Film Festival

Giuseppe De Santis (1917–1997) was a pioneering Italian filmmaker and one of the foremost voices of neorealism. A co-writer of Visconti’s Ossessione (1942), he made his directorial debut with Tragic Hunt (1947). His celebrated Bitter Rice (1949) became a milestone of Italian cinema, earning an Academy Award nomination and competing for the Grand Prize at Cannes. Renowned for his impassioned portrayals of workers and social injustice, he brought realism and emotion to postwar film. Honoured with the Career Golden Lion at Venice in 1995, De Santis remains a defining figure in twentieth-century Italian cinema.

The restoration of “Roma ore 11” was carried out in 2025 by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia- Cineteca Nazionale in collaboration with Titanus S.p.A. The original negatives cannot be found, so a sound dupe was used for the restoration. The scans were carried out by the CSC Digital lab. The restoration work was entrusted to Laboratorio Video Master Digital S.r.l.