Orgosolo is a tiny village on the Italian island of Sardinia. Recent tourism has raised the island’s economic prospects, but the rural areas have lived in abject poverty for decades. The people are farmers and sheep herders. The island has a certain amount of autonomy from the rest of Italy, but the militaristic Carabinieri retained a strong presence there leaving the people quite distrustful of the national government.
Buy Bandits of Orgosolo Blu-rayDirector Vittorio de Seta shot a couple of short documentaries in and around Orgosolo, but he knew if he wanted the world to know about this place and its people, he needed to make a feature film. Shot on a shoestring budget, Bandits of Orgosolo tells the story of Michele Cossu (Michele Cossu), a sheep herder who runs into some trouble with the Carabinieri when he is falsely accused of stealing some sheep and killing a policeman. Inherently distrusting the Caribinieri and the court system, he flees rather than facing trial. Taking his young brother Peppeddu (Peppeddu Cuccu) and his small herd of sheep with him, this band of fugitives traverses the craggy, mountainous terrain of Sardinia facing obstacle after hardship in hopes of finding a safe place to rest.
Vittorio de Seta shoots the film with an artist’s eye and a poet’s heart. As you can probably tell from those credits, he used non-professional actors from the region who were essentially playing themselves, acting out stories they more or less lived through. It is breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly sad.
Michele lives outside the village in a little rock hut with Peppeddu and his sheep. He’s managed to scrape a little money together, enough to buy his mother a small house and buy himself a couple of dozen sheep (although he doesn’t own them outright, he still owes money on them). It isn’t much but it is more than his father had before he died. He has resigned himself to this life and the inherent struggles that come with it.
One day, Michele notices some pigs that have been hidden in a rock enclosure. Then he spies an injured man in his hut, and another walking outside. He instinctively knows they are bandits. He tells them they must leave. He refuses to eat the pig meat they offer him, declaring he doesn’t eat stolen food. The bandits stay the night and Michel doesn’t force the issue. The next day the Caribinieri show up. The bandits flee into the mountains. Michele hides the slaughtered pig in his hut. Though he could simply tell the police that the bandits stole the pigs and that they have fled into the mountains, he does not. He lies and says he purchased the slaughtered pig at a market and that he hasn’t seen any strange men about.
In the same way he did not force the bandits to leave his home, he cannot rat them out to the Carabinieri. He did not like the bandits, but he has a moral code. The Carabiniere spy the bandits and a gunfight ensues. Michele uses the confusion this brings to take his brother and sheep and run. For the rest of the film, they are on the run. But where can they go? There is no safe place. They have no money so they cannot leave the island. Their friends and family do what they can but their hands are tied. They must keep running, hoping one day the Carabinieri will just give up.
The island is not that hospitable to the sheep in the best of times. Now they must go high into the mountains where the landscape is rocky and dry. There is little food and hardly any water. They must travel quickly all day and into the night. At one point, they find a little water – small puddles of it and a drying stream. As they are getting water to the animals, a man approaches. He says this is his water and they must leave. It is a terribly cruel thing to say as clearly the men and sheep are dying of thirst, but he has his own sheep and they need that water. Life is hard.
Vittorio de Seta was a member of the Italian neorealism movement and it certainly shows here. It is shot almost like a documentary. There are some professional lighting setups in the interior scenes, and pieces of a musical score come through. But it all looks very naturalistic. He avoids emotional manipulation when at all possible, letting his story unfold realistically. The landscape is gorgeous and he certainly had an eye for where to place his camera. The actors are utterly believable, even if they are essentially playing themself. They worked from a very loose script with de Seta allowing them to find their own words, saying the things they would say in these circumstances.
The tagline for the film indicates that Michele is forced into banditry, making it sound like he’ll spend much of the film stealing and murdering, turning the movie into an action-adventure. So, I guess it isn’t a spoiler to say he doesn’t actually resort to banditry until the very end. When all else has failed him, when he thinks he has no other choice, that’s when he finally succumbs and becomes a thief. It is a film that beautifully portrays the desperation of a man who has been beaten by society. It is an incredible movie.
Radiance Films presents Bandits of Orgosolo with a new 4K restoration, scanned from the 35mm original camera negative. It looks stunningly gorgeous. Extras include two new interviews. One with filmmaker Ehsan Khoshbakht about the making of the film and how it revitalized the Neorealism movement. The second is with cinematographer Luciano Tovoli who details his background and the work he did on the film. Due to some on-set arguments, he is credited only as a camera operator on this film instead of a cinematographer. Unfortunately, the rights to the documentaries de Seta shot on the island were not made available to Radiance Films and thus are not included on this disc. Still, the film is fantastic and the print here is simply gorgeous.
