These are fifty astonishing black-and-white photographs taken by Luigi Comencini (1916–2007) in the period before he became a film director: labourers digging, peasants in the city, a Sunday painter, children at play or staring back at the camera – the suspended atmosphere of the early post-war years. Nothing would ever be the same again, but the future was still hard to imagine. Each shot tells a small story; cinema would bind them together. The volume is completed by texts by various authors who shed light on the connections between Comencini's photographs and his work as a film director and as a co-founder of the Cineteca Italiana in Milan in 1947 – the first film archive in Italy.