Mamma Roma

Jan 18 1965 Not Rated 1h 46m
Drama

After years spent working as a prostitute in her Italian village, middle-aged Mamma Roma has saved enough money to buy herself a fruit stand so that she can have a respectable middle-class life and reestablish contact with the 16-year-old son she abandoned when he was an infant. But her former pimp threatens to expose her sordid past, and her troubled son seems destined to fall into a life of crime and violence.

Plot

With a fervent yearning for respectability and enough money to buy herself a brand-new life in Rome, the uninhibited, fearless, determined former streetwalker Mamma Roma renounces her ignominious past to reunite with her loafing 16-year-old son Ettore. Free at last from her disgusting pimp and ex-lover Carmine, Roma is bent on making an honest living running a humble vegetable stall, but a malicious extortion scheme and the equally insidious menace of exposure threaten to put an end to her zealous aspirations for a decent bourgeois existence. For his own sake, Ettore must be spared the violence of the adult world; nevertheless, can a lone single mother protect her only son from the same snares that wounded her youth?

Written by

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Directed by

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Production Countries

Italy

Production Companies

Arco Film

Languages

Italiano

Awards

2 wins & 1 nomination

Scores
# of Votes
11,315
Average Rating
7.7 out of 10
Metascore
NA
Popularity
NA