- Roberto uses alternative teaching methods, but manages to create a special bond with his kindergarten students.
- Roberto has a new job as the teacher at a nursery school. The first child he meets is Gianluigi, who's mute. Roberto is spirited, bringing a TV into class, then a donkey. He takes children on an unscheduled field trip to their fathers' plant. He dates Isabella, the mother of one of his students, and soon she's pregnant. He's moody about it, so Isabella leaves for her family's abandoned movie theater in Sardinia, but not before Roberto is briefly arrested and questioned about past radical activity. He takes ten children, including Gianluigi, to Sardinia for the baby's birth, and there, surrounded by the sea, the mother of us all, he and Gianluigi play out their surprising bond.—<jhailey@hotmail.com>
- This is a 1979 film directed by Marco Ferreri, winner of the Silver Bear, grand jury prize at the 1979 Berlin Film Festival. For the first time in a nursery school in Corticella (Bologna) a male teacher takes service. Roberto, this is his name, is an excellent educator, who immediately has an excellent relationship with children (who among other things greatly appreciate the unusual non "maternal" presence in the teaching staff), and with colleagues; however his educational methods, rather unconventional and inspired by a great freedom, will lead him to have some problems with law enforcement officers. Roberto, a kindergarten teacher, is well received by his colleagues, loved by the children, but hindered by parents who do not understand his relationships with their children. A special bond is born with a psychically disturbed child. M. Ferreri made an open film, an extraordinary fable that goes in search of itself, passing through the scenes of everyday life and fiction and following the non-story of a delicate and poignant Benigni. Roberto establishes a relationship with Isabella, the unmarried mother of his pupil Michela, and the woman finds herself pregnant again; moreover, he is particularly friendly with Gianluigi, a child suffering from behavioral disorders, who does not speak and eats very little and in consideration of this he is removed from kindergarten to be hosted in a nursing home. In the following summer, Isabella, close to giving birth, expresses her intention to move to Sardinia where she owns a disused cinema. Roberto, although not expressly invited to follow her, accompanies her together with a group of children including Gianluigi. Just on the day when Isabella gives birth to her second child, Gianluigi begins to show the first real signs of healing.
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