Another early offshoot of neorealism, Domenica d'Agosto shows Italians, and the Italian cinema, slowly emerging from the despair of the postwar era. Shooting entirely on location, former documentary filmmaker Luciano Emmer beautifully and naturally evokes a dawn-to-dusk day at the beach, where Rome's poor flock by the thousands and the classes meet (and avoid) each other. A cast of professional and non-professional actors features Marcello Mastroianni in one of his very first films, as well as Franco Interlenghi from Shoeshine. Emmer so skillfully integrates his plot into the whole picture, we are convinced that such romances and small treacheries must take place all summer long, among these very real though fictional people.