Padre Padrone

Released 1977
Stars Omero Antonutti, Saverio Marconi, Fabrizio Forte
Directed by Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani

This powerful true tale of one boy's struggle out of isolation and silence is perfectly captured on film by the renowned Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio (Night Sun; Good Morning, Babylon). Based on the autobiography by Gavino Ledda, who at the age of six was taken from school into the mountains where his father enslaved him as a shepherd. Gavino eventually broke free discovering the outside world and his own identity within it.

A Grand prize winner at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival, Padre Padrone is an incredible story of perseverance and is 'an exhilarating example of filmmaking.'

Summary from www.netflix.com

This isn't a film so much as an indictment. It's an angry expose of the lives of Sardinian shepherds, and the cruelty here is almost unthinkable. To plop a six year-old boy in a pasture miles from home and force him to live there in solitude is just cruel, and to forbid him from having contact with any other children in the region is sadistic. The excuse is the boys must be on top of their flocks at all times to ward off predators and thieves, but that's what dogs and bells are for. It's no wonder why Gavino is so angry and bitter about his childhood. What childhood? Freezing on top of a mountain by himself and getting beaten by his father is no childhood.

Farmers have always had children with the purpose of them working on the farm. In the U.S. today, we only need about 1% of the population to raise about 120% of the food we need, so this tradition has been broken here. I'm an example of that, but it certainly hasn't been broken in other parts of the world. This movie is a document of that, and I would imagine Gavino's book and this movie brought attention to that particular situation.

This could have been a great film, but there's no character development and we learn nothing about Gavino. At one point his friend says he's tighter than a clam, and it's true. We learn about his life and predicament, but we learn nothing about him or his family. On the plus side, Gavino's father isn't depicted as a monster. He's cruel, but he's simply extending the cycle that he knows. I don't consider the beatings necessarily sadistic. He doesn't want to inflict pain, but he does so to make Gavino obey. As a father I understand wanting obedience, but good lord where's the humanity? He treats his family like livestock. Considering Gavino's childhood, I suppose that's all his father has ever known. --Bill Alward, January 21, 2002