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Drama

Rocco and His Brothers

Rocco e i suoi fratelli

Year
1960
Length
179 minBFI theatrical and Player presentation Version sources ↓

A mother and her five sons move from southern Italy to Milan, where work, boxing, ambition, and desire pull the family into competing futures.

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Rocco and His Brothers — Five coats and boxing gloves hang near a Milan window.

Image: Monocurator · source · Original Monocurator artwork

What to expect

Visconti combines social observation with operatic family melodrama across a vast urban canvas. The brothers’ different responses to migration make solidarity, masculinity, labour, and violence parts of the same difficult inheritance.

How to ease in

This is a long film organised around the brothers. Keep Rocco, Simone, and Ciro distinct, and use the boxing world as the place where family need and individual ambition become hardest to separate.

Heads-up

A quick, non-exhaustive note Includes sexual violence, intimate-partner abuse, murder, boxing violence, misogyny, poverty, criminal activity, and sustained family distress.
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The family arrives together, but Milan gives each brother a different clock. I feel tragedy grow whenever loyalty asks them to preserve the family by ignoring what one of its members has done.

— Momo

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Credits & versions

Credits

Version map

BFI theatrical and Player presentation 179 min · UK 179 minutes is attached only to the named BFI theatrical and Player presentation. No unsupported cut, score, territory, frame rate, source element, or restoration detail is inferred. Source: British Film Institute — Rocco and His Brothers Runtime reference · Checked 2026-08-21

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