Hidden Away is a 2020 Italian biographical drama directed by Giorgio Diritti about the naïf painter Antonio Ligabue, available on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles.
What is Hidden Away about?
Antonio Ligabue arrives in Italy from Switzerland, not by choice, and ends up on the flat farmland along the river Po. He has no money, no family to lean on and no accepted place in the community that takes him in; the people around him see an outsider who keeps to himself and lives rough among the poplar trees by the water. What he does have is a habit of drawing. Over the years that habit becomes a vocation: he paints lions, tigers and jaguars, animals that exist nowhere in the valley around him, without any formal training. The film follows that long arc, from a boy nobody wants to a painter whose pictures begin to be noticed beyond the riverbank, keeping the poverty, the floods and the isolation in the frame alongside the work itself.
About the cast
Elio Germano heads the cast list, followed by Oliver Ewy, Leonardo Carrozzo, Pietro Traldi, Orietta Notari, Fabrizio Careddu, Andrea Gherpelli and Denis Campitelli. The story covers a long stretch of Ligabue's life, from childhood onward, and the supporting roles come from the farming communities and townspeople of the Po valley where the painter lived.
Context & significance
Giorgio Diritti is an Italian director, and Hidden Away runs about two hours as a biography-drama hybrid. Its subject belongs to what is usually called naïf art, a term for painters who worked outside academies and developed a style on their own. Ligabue's case, as the film presents it, is tied to a specific landscape: the poplar groves, river floods and farm labour of the Po valley in northern Italy, where he spent years in poverty while continuing to draw. The screenplay treats his biography as both a hard life and a kind of folk tale, in which a marginalised figure finds a way to be seen through his pictures.
Watching Hidden Away on Ktime
Hidden Away streams on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so viewers can pick the original Italian audio with Farsi text or the dubbed track. Watching requires a K-Time account; logging in is free, and the interface is in Farsi, built for Persian-speaking viewers outside Iran.