The Holy Innocents

A farm in the south of Spain in the sixties. Paco and his family live there and work for the landowner. Paco's job is to find birds like a hunting dog; when the master shoots, he retrieves what falls. His wife works in the house, his children are growing, and his sister's son Azarías is with them; the man has a mental disability and the one thing he is attached to is a bird he raised by hand. One day the master shoots that bird. Mario Camus directs. The source is Miguel Delibes's novel. Alfredo Landa plays Paco and Francisco Rabal plays Azarías. The two actors shared the best actor award at the Cannes film festival in 1984. The subject is the order of masters. The landowner is nowhere openly cruel; he is courteous and even generous, and that manner is exactly what shows what the relationship is. The film treats rural class relations in Spain at the end of the Franco period directly and counts among the important works of the reckoning that followed the regime. The narrative proceeds calmly and violence appears only in the last section; the preparation is long and deliberately slow. Francisco Rabal's performance uses almost no words. Who it is for: viewers who follow the classics of Spanish cinema and social realist narrative. Who it is not for: the pace is very slow, the subject is heavy, and the ending is harsh.