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This chapter consider Neorealism in its strictest historical terms as a phase of Italian film production going from the end of World War II to the early 1950s and focuses on its transnational dimension. First of all we want to reconstruct the transnational story of the discourse about (and of) Neorealism, from the moment preceding its actual existence, the period spanning from the late 1930s to the early 1940s, when the project of a new Italian cinema was designed by a group of young film intellectuals, to the its worldwide diffusion after the war and inclusion among the most vital trends in the “culture of reconstruction” (Hewitt 1989). Then we will focus on the modes of production of a few films that, due to their peculiar characteristics, put Italy in contact with other countries: films that were made through co-production agreements, that represented foreign characters or involved foreign professionals, and whose distribution abroad aroused diplomatic tensions. This will lead us to describe how the governmental institutions that controlled film production – in a context in which State intervention was key to the functioning of the industrial system – established the conditions for realist contents to be staged and diffused, and regulated the amount of cinematic “Realism” authorized in the different films.