The Holy Innocents

The Holy Innocents is a 1984 Spanish drama film directed by Mario Camus based on Miguel Delibes' novel of the same title which stars Alfredo Landa and Francisco Rabal. The plot explores the lives of landless labourers scraping by in an aristocratic estate in 1960s Extremadura. The film earned wide critical acclaim both in the domestic and the international front, also becoming the highest-grossing Spanish film in Spain at the time. In the 1984 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the film was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury Special Mention. Rabal and Landa shared the Best Actor Award at the same festival. It was voted the third best Spanish film by professionals and critics in 1996 Spanish cinema centenary. Plot Paco and Régula live on a rural estate owned by an absent marchioness with their three children. Nieves works as a maid in the big house, Quirce is doing his military service, and Charito is severely handicapped. The parents accept the repeated humiliations of their position as dependents at the whim of the owners and the estate manager, but Nieves and Quirce aim for a better life. The family is joined by Régula's mentally handicapped brother Azarías, sacked from another estate, who loves birds. The owner's son Ivan often comes back to the estate for two reasons: he is conducting an affair with the manager's bored wife Pura and he is fanatical about shooting birds. Paco, whom he forces up a tree to decoy pigeons, falls and breaks a leg. Then he tries using the simple Azarías and, in a fit of pique, shoots the man's pet jackdaw. Next time Azarías is sent up a tree to work decoys, he drops a noose round Ivan's neck and hangs him. Mentally a child, he is shut up in a secure asylum.