This weekend, Rice Cinema and the Menil Collection will be joining forces for an outdoor screening of a film by someone who is considered the master of Italian neo-realist cinema. On April 9, Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 film “Paisan” will be shown on the Menil’s front lawn.

The second film in Rossellini’s “war trilogy,” nestled between his 1945 classic “Rome, Open City” and his 1948 melodrama “Germany, Year Zero,” “Paisan” (“fellow countryman” in Italian) is an episodic film. Made in the aftermath of World War II with a cast of actors and nonprofessionals, the movie consists of several stories where American soldiers and Italians try to communicate with each other during the Italian campaign, when Nazi Germany was losing against the Allies.