Synopsis
The Holy Innocents (Los santos inocentes, 1984) is a Spanish drama by Mario Camus you can watch online on iFILM. It unfolds in 1960s Extremadura, where a poor peasant family serves wealthy landowners and swallows every humiliation in silence.
Paco, a small farmhand, hauls his masters' gear on their hunts. His wife Régula keeps the household running. And old Azarías drifts through his own world, nursing a tame bird and barely grasping the cruelty around him. To the landed gentry these people are livestock with names. Paco wants one thing: for his children to learn to read and escape the trap their parents were born into. The class wall holds firm, and obedience quietly breeds a rage that has nowhere to go.
Adapted from Miguel Delibes' novel, the film handed Alfredo Landa and Francisco Rabal a shared Best Actor prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, a rare honor for Spanish cinema. There are no big speeches here, no lessons spelled out. It simply lays bare a kind of bondage that passes for ordinary life. If slow, hard-edged social cinema is your thing, this one sticks with you. Stream The Holy Innocents (1984) online on iFILM.
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