I bambini e noi is a six-part investigative report for television which encompasses all regions and social classes. “Simply starting the camera withoutpreparing anything in advance, Comencini gently but resolutely poses questions of the children, a bit like a teacher and a bit like a father, with his body and unwieldly microphone comically intruding into the frame. He tries to offset the artificiality of relationships mediated by the film camera and by differences in age and culture with his own openness, in order to create a relationship of mutual understanding and reciprocal exchange in which the television medium itself plays a role, becoming an object of exchange like Maurizio’s bicycle, a vehicle of playful interaction or challenge … Comencini ends up placing the accent of his inquiry I bambini e noi [The children and us] firmly on the ‘us’: on the responsibilities of adults, which he will return to investigate in his next work for television”. In 1977 the director re-edited and updated the film, revisiting the grown-up children with a sense of disappointment. He also decided to expand his examination of adults in another five-part investigation, L’amore in Italia. “Searching for the cause of the children’s malaise in adults and turning the lens back on ‘us’, Comencini reveals relationships based on artifice, confusion and emptiness. This is true of all classes in his sample, from the Sicilian housewife to the Northern entrepreneur, from the gay couple to the members of a commune, or the traditional Catholic family … This passage from childhood to adult life is marked by another significant change: a shift in gender. All of Comencini’s children, with the single exception of Cleopatra in The Scientific Cardplayer, are boys. Conversely, adult Italy, in the little space for positivity and future plans that remains, is female. It is a little like Antonioni’s cinema: men are confined to minor roles as children who resist growing up; they remain misogynists or mummy’s boys, subordinates or profiteers”

(Laura Buffoni, in Luigi Comencini. Il cinema e i film, edited by Adriano Aprà, Marsilio, Venice 2007).