Padre Padrone

A Sardinian shepherd manages to free himself from his family, educate himself, then return home to fight an overdue battle with the figure who oppressed him, his father. Padre Padrone is a terrific subject, a true story that illuminates a universal problem: how can one man make a positive stand against his own patriarchal society? The boy's acquisition of language is a key factor, and the film's triumph is that it actualises this in an extraordinarily emotive way: after a consciously theatrical introduction, it presents fragments of experience (landscape, sounds, routines) which cohere into a vision of nature and human society as the boy matures.