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. –IMDb
An agent for a liqueur company, he became involved in the cinema by making short advertising films; later he worked in the production sector and finally in the sale of cinema equipment, moving to Spain. There he met the young humorist Rafael Azcona, with whom he set up an extraordinary, lasting working relationship: the first fruits of their partnership were “El pisito” (1958), “Los chicos” (1959) and “The Little Coach (El cochecito)” (1960), the three “Spanish comedies” marked by a corrosive anti-bourgeois sarcasm. On returning to Italy, Ferreri continued his Spanish theme with “Queen Bee (L’ape regina)” (1963), an anti-Catholic satire in which the institution of matrimony is so fiercely under fire as to unleash the ire of the censor (requiring various cuts in the film and a slight change to the title). He fared no better with “The Ape Woman (La donna scimmia)” (1964), a bitter and lucid parable on the relationships between the sexes, dominated by the exploitation of the weaker sex… read more
