Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves)

Satyajit Ray saw De Sica's film in London in 1950 and has written that he came out of the cinema having decided to make Pather Panchali: non professional actors, real locations, and a story small enough to be about one family's money. He told it himself, in the essays collected as Our Films, Their Films. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pather_Panchali

The Dardennes are the clearest inheritors neorealism has. De Sica's rules are theirs: shoot on the real streets, cast a non-professional in the lead, build the whole film on one small economic problem, and refuse the music and the lighting that would tell an audience how to feel. Rosetta keeps a girl's job as the entire plot the way Bicycle Thieves keeps a bicycle as the entire plot, and both end without resolving the thing they are about. The difference is the camera. De Sica watches from a distance; the Dardennes put a handheld lens on the back of Rosetta's head and stay there. Filed MEDIUM: a tradition carried forward rather than one film answering another. The film's real-world consequence, the Belgian law on youth wages named after it, is already recorded separately.