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1958 was the year of the death of Pope Pius XII, the most authoritarian pontiff of modern times. Angelo Transeunti, a spoiled, rebellious rich boy, enters, in the same year, a religious school full of students bored by the strict rules and old-fashioned teaching methods of the priests. Angelo's arrival transforms school life and, under his leadership, students and employees start a revolution.

With a great deal of surrealist wit, Bellocchio explores the abuses of the authority of institutions in a superb film about the tyrannies of paternalism, the failure of a revolution and the Italian Church’s power of survival.