At the end of World War II, shallow, self-centered Mara is the prettiest girl in her small Italian village; Bebo is a Communist partisan who is finding it difficult to adjust to the dull banalities of life in peacetime. When Mara’s father, a passionate Communist, declares that his daughter will marry the returning hero, her reactions range from joy to bitter resentment.
With the participation of the inhabitants of Tirli (GR). RAI television film, based on a short story (1954) by Carlo Cassola and scripted by Marcello Fondato and Giuseppe Lazzari, filmed on location, aired on 19-9-1963. It is the simple story of a group of woodcutters in the Grossetano area with their problems, individual stories, small and big intimate dramas. It is a film with a Rossellini-style realist slant where, without falling into scenicism, the importance of the landscape is combined with the psychological subtlety of the characters and the lucid and critical description of their behaviour. "A phenomenological film that manages to introduce, in the objectivity of the realistic vision, a disturbing moral dimension" (G. Rondolino).
