Padre Padrone

Padre Padrone tells the true story of Gavino Ledda, a boy growing up in rural Sardinia in the 1940s. Taken out of school after only a few months so he can help his father tend sheep in the pastures, he spends his childhood and adolescence in near-total isolation, cut off from education and from other people. His father rules the household with harsh authority, treating his son more like a servant than a child. The conflict at the heart of the film is Gavino's struggle to break free of that control: conscripted into the army at about twenty-one, he seizes the chance to learn to read and write, and after his service he rejects the life of subordination his father imposed on him and pursues an education, eventually becoming a linguist and university professor.

The film was directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, their second feature after Allonsanfan in 1974, and the brothers wrote the screenplay with Gavino Ledda, adapting his autobiographical book. Omero Antonutti plays the father, with Saverio Marconi as the adult Gavino and Fabrizio Forte as the young Gavino, alongside Marcella Michelangeli, Marino Cenna and Stanko Molnar. It was produced by Giuliani G. De Negri with backing from RAI and CINEMA S.r.l., and runs 114 minutes.

On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.2 out of 10 from roughly 4,700 votes, and on TMDB 6.8 out of 10 from about 132 votes. A critics' rating of 7.3 from ten reviews places it close to the audience scores.