Padre Padrone

Padre Padrone (1977) is the Taviani brothers' Italian drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, it retells the real life of Gavino Ledda, a Sardinian shepherd who taught himself to read as a grown man.

A father pulls six-year-old Gavino out of class: the sheep can't wait, the books can. What follows is years of solitude on a mountain pasture, where beatings stand in for conversation. Omero Antonutti makes the father's authority almost physical, with no wasted gesture. The break comes during military service — hearing other voices and music for the first time, Gavino grasps that language is the way out. He opens a textbook at an age when his peers already have careers.

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani shoot it almost like ethnography — Sardinian dialect, the noise of livestock, wind in place of a score — yet shape it into a parable about power, speech and freedom. Ledda himself turns up in the prologue. Rarely does a film about learning to read grip harder than a thriller. Stream Padre Padrone (1977) online on iFILM.