Cinema
The Holy Innocents
Los santos inocentes
Mario Camus · 1984
Synopsis
A large estate in Extremadura, near the Portuguese border, in the early sixties. Paco and Régula live there with their three children in the service of the masters and bear their orders and humiliations without a word of complaint: Nieves works in the big house, Quirce is doing his military service, and little Charito, severely disabled, never leaves her cradle. Azarías, Régula's brother, simple-minded, dismissed from another estate, comes to live with them; he loves nothing so much as birds. Señorito Iván, the owners' son, often comes to hunt.
Context
The film adapts the novel that Miguel Delibes published in 1981 and whose title recalls the massacre of the Innocents. Camus, Antonio Larreta and Nicolás Matji reduced its six episodes to four and each wrote a share of them. Shooting began in the last days of October 1983, between Mérida, Zafra and Alburquerque; Antón García Abril's music is played on the rebec. Alfredo Landa, Terele Pávez, Juan Diego and Francisco Rabal play the leading roles. It became the most profitable Spanish film of its time in the country and was not released in France until 2021.
Who it is for
A rural drama that shows the hierarchy of an estate through the gestures of work, of the table and of the hunt.
Prizes and reception
At Cannes in 1984, the Best Actor award shared by Alfredo Landa and Francisco Rabal, and a special mention from the Ecumenical Jury.