The Best of Youth · reception & legacy

How The Best of Youth has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Made for Italian TV and initially shelved by RAI, it detoured to Cannes 2003, won Un Certain Regard, and came home a phenomenon — two decades on it's settled in as one of the great 21st-century epics, the film people cite when arguing that six hours can fly by.

What's debated

The perennial debate is whether it's cinema at all — a TV miniseries that won at Cannes — and whether its warm, novelistic classicism is a feature or a bit too smooth for a film spanning Italy's years of lead.

Its footprint

It's the canonical answer to 'what long film is actually worth it' — a fixture of best-films-over-four-hours lists — and its title nods to a poetry collection by Pier Paolo Pasolini, a touchstone Italian audiences clock immediately.

Where it stands

A word-of-mouth epic and Letterboxd sleeper favourite: under-seen, evangelized hard by everyone who's finished it, and routinely handed to friends as a 'trust me, clear a weekend' recommendation.