Film Series

This Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event explores the film work of celebrated American novelist, journalist, and poet Alfred Hayes, who co-wrote several Italian neorealist and Hollywood classics.

Born in London, Hayes moved to New York at the age of three and developed his voice as a journalist and poet during his college years. After being assigned to a special services unit in Italy during World War II, he stayed on in Rome, where he worked as a writer on Roberto Rossellini's Paisan and Vittorio DeSica's Bicycle Thieves. Upon his return to the US, his screenwriting continued in Hollywood, where he wrote Clash by Night, A Hatful of Rain, and Fritz Lang's Human Desire, among others.

This series is co-curated with N1FR, n+1’s film review, and NYRB Classics, the publisher of Hayes’s novels In Love and My Face for the World to See. Both films screen in 35mm.