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The first film to win both the Golden Palm and the Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, this haunting tale of a peasant boy's brutal coming-of-age in rural Italy established the reputation of acclaimed fraternal filmmakers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani.
It tells the story of Gavino, a six- year-old boy who is pulled out of school by his tyrant father and forced to work as a shepherd in the inhospitable mountains of Sardinia. The following years are a catalogue of hardship and loneliness, but Gavino's bleak existence is tempered when as a teen he begins to play the accordion. His father tries to repress this emerging independence, but Gavino, now a young man, soon finds liberation by seeking out the education he was denied as a child.
Forbidding landscapes, stark realism and surreal images of the strange, repressed sexuality that punctures Gavino's world combine to create a masterpiece of Italian cinema.
Italian dialogue with English subtitles.
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