Portrait of Tullio Saba, a miner who put his stamp on the political and cultural awakening of Sardinia in the first half of this century. Saba had a wonderful singing voice and also had the ability to give oppressed workers a voice and a trade union. He rose to be a politician, borne on high by the people and heartily cursed by the propertied classes. His weakness for women served to complete the legend. Cabiddu did not give his portrait of Saba the realism of the class-struggle of Claude Berri’s Germinal or Stijn Coninx’ Daens. Striking is the romance of the film itself, the dream that may be worth more than real history, the reminiscence of the lyrical commitment of films that we admired so much at Rotterdam festivals in the seventies. Cabiddu evokes this mood in finely stylised but never excessive pictures and through the beautiful music of Franco Piersanti.
