Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have been collaborating on films since the early 1960s. Among their best known works are St. Michael Had a Rooster (San Michele Aveva un Gallo, 1971), Allonsanfan (1974), Padre Padrone (1977), The Meadow (Il Prato, 1979), The Night of the Shooting Stars (1981) and Xaos (1984). In her book on Italian cinema, Passion and Defiance, Mira Liehm characterizes "the goal that the Tavianis set for themselves at the very beginning of their career: to act out the radical options of the present in various formal and historical settings." The Tavianis were born in San Miniato, a Tuscan village which, like the village of San Martino in The Night of the Shooting Stars, was the site of a massacre perpetrated by the Germans in 1944. The Night of the Shooting Stars is history filtered through human memory and imagination--it is at once collective and intensely personal, a wild fantasy that is only heightened by realism, and the fact that every incident depicted is based on a similar incident either observed by the Tavianis or garnered from some forty years of oral histories. In the last days of the German occupation, families in San Martino are torn between their loyalty to the compromised authority of a collaborationist priest, the local Black Shirts in their final spasm of power, and the pull of a farmer, Galvano (Omero Antonutti, of Padre Padrone) who assures them that the Germans mean to blow up the village on departing. Galvano leads a flock of fellow skeptics into the countryside; they wait, mourning in advance the loss of their village. Meanwhile, others, forced to trust because of age, health, or cowardice, gather in the Cathedral on the weak word of the priest that they will be safe. They will not. Incredibly, this whole tragedy is related in flashback through the eyes of a six-year-old child who, in her state of childlike grace, figures the pilgrimage from San Martino and the absurd search through the countryside for American soldiers to be a thrilling adventure. It is her vision that lends the film an hallucinatory quality, captured in such bravura images as the night flight of villagers across the fields, or a bloody battle between partisans and fascists in a hayfield. "(The film) has the effect of a realistic fairy tale set in everyday life.... a poetic epic of overwhelming terror and beauty" (Mira Liehm). The Night of the Shooting Stars won the Special Jury Prize at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.