Banditi A Orgosolo

The first and best known of De Seta’s fiction films, Banditi A Orgosolo is a wistful account of the lives of poor shepherds in the mountains of Sardinia. It tells of an honest Sardinian shepherd who, because of his loyalty to the local code of honour is wrongly accused of a theft. With his younger brother in tow he flees to the mountains where his flock, which represents his entire life's work, perish and the pair become actual bandits, stealing a flock from a neighbour's farm and so reinforcing the brutal struggle for survival that is the lot of these people (in this respect from our perspective one can’t help but think of Coppola’s The Godfather II and Vito's return home to avenge his mother.

Banditi A Orgosolo is a marvellous work, filmed more in the dramatized documentary style of Humphrey Jennings and Robert Flaherty (it grew out of a documentary Pastori DI Orgoloso that De Setamade the previous year) than the neo-realism of De Sica although it is comparable to Visconti's account of poor Siciliian fishermen, La Terra Trema (1948).

De Seta who like de Sica also came from wealthy antecedents and sold two of his family properties to make the film keeps close to the reality that lies behind the story, using non-professionals who spoke in dialect as his players and using the landscape to great effect, thus being at once true to his subject matter and poetic in his heart-wrenching depiction of the primitive nature of this passing world.

 

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