Lazzaro Felice
Why we chose this film
History has repeatedly shown how victims of oppression can turn into oppressors.
How the bullied can turn into bullies.
What makes us choose to pass on our suffering?
During our lifetime, we will be facing many challenges that are out of our control.
What we can control is our response to them.
Rather than enabling injustice we have suffered to prevail, we can choose to make nobody pay for it.
As Bell Hooks beautifully said:
What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.
Let’s choose kindness and love, as young Lazzaro does, however difficult it may be.
It might help to remind ourselves that our oppressor is most likely a former victim of oppression himself.
Film Summary
In a remote village, Inviolata, peasants endure lives of unquestioning toil.
Lazzaro, a good-hearted young peasant, is always being bullied and teased and ordered about, but his heartbreakingly good-natured smile stays in place. He and the 50-odd workers are harvesting tobacco on land owned by an imperious, cantankerous Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna, whose hard-faced factotum Nicola enforces an arrangement whereby, in exchange for the crop, they stay in their unsanitary hovels rent-free and get whatever goods and necessities Nicola can deliver in his van, but his book-keeping somehow always shows them to be in the Marchesa’s debt at the end of the month. They are trapped in mezzadria, or sharecropping, the serfdom of what is surely a bygone age, and have known nothing else for generations.
One fateful day, the Marchesa’s spoilt, manipulative and emotionally needy son Tancredi befriends lonely Lazzaro, because he wants him to help with a plan to fake his own kidnapping.
The friendship is the greatest thing that has ever happened to Lazzaro, but the plan results in a police search for Tancredi, alerting them to something important about this community of impoverished and imprisoned slaves.