The Tavianis most important work is Padre Padrone (aka Father, Master), based on a memoir by the academic linguist Gavino Ledda about his harsh upbringing as the son of a psychologically and physically abusive peasant farmer in postwar Sardinia
Date/Time: Jan 10 2018, 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm
Vancouver, Vancity Theatre | Event calendarAge: 19+
Cost: $13.00
Find tickets: here
"The Tavianis] most important work is Padre Padrone (aka Father, Master), based on a memoir by the academic linguist Gavino Ledda about his harsh upbringing as the son of a psychologically and physically abusive peasant farmer in postwar Sardinia, and how he came to create his own life. Taken out of school aged six, Gavino is forced to take care of the family’s sheep in the mountains and at the age of 20 is illiterate. Then family circumstances force him to join the army. There he drops his local dialect, learns to read and write and is inspired to go to university and make a forcible break with an oppressive patriarchal tradition.
It is a gritty realistic story told in a stylized, impressionistic, at times Brechtian manner, with two actors playing Gavino at six (Fabrizio Forte, below) and 20, a brilliantly unsympathetic but understanding performance from Omero Antonutti as the father, and Ledda himself topping and tailing the picture. The film is full of vivid, incisive incident and powerful metaphors, and though affirmative it’s devoid of sentimentality or triumphalism. Padre Padrone received the Palme d’Or at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival and it is widely believed that the president of the jury, Roberto Rossellini, expended so much energy in defying the festival’s directorate (who wanted the award to go to Carlo Ponti’s A Special Day) and persuading his jury that it brought on his fatal heart attack days later. However, Pauline Kael, who was on the jury and thought it a ’near-great movie’, wrote after Rossellini’s death that ’there was no question among members of the jury that it had to win the Golden Palm’." Philip French, The Observer
"Padre Padrone is a work of art, a poetically realized piece of social realism that stands in the same relation to conventional movie entertainments as Picasso’s Guernica to a war bond poster…[it] is an affirmation, a forceful, uncompromised, engrossing and affecting movie with that rare but cherished capacity to thrust us into the lives of others." Charles Champlin, LA Times , 1978
"One of a kind, the movie has an archaic, almost mythological, feel that’s enhanced by its use of elemental Sardinian locations under the blazing Mediterranean sun." J Hoberman, New York Times
More info