With over six decades of an illustrious filmmaking career, Marco Bellocchio’s latest feature, Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara, will be coming U.S. theaters later this month from Cohen Media Group. A story once in the hands of Steven Spielberg to adapt, the 84-year-old Italian director’s latest work follows Edgardo Mortara, a seven-year-old Jewish boy who was taken from his family in Bologna to be raised Catholic in the actual arms of Pope Pius IX. Ahead of the May 24 release, we’re pleased to exclusively announce NYC’s Quad Cinema will be presenting the retrospective “Marco Bellocchio’s Film of Revolution,” taking place May 17-23.
See the lineup below.
- Fists in the Pocket (Bellocchio, 1965)
- In the Name of the Father (Bellocchio, 1971)
- A Leap in the Dark (Bellocchio, 1980)
- Enrico IV (Bellocchio, 1984)
- Devil in the Flesh (Bellocchio, 1986)
- Good Morning, Night (Bellocchio, 2003)
- Marx Can Wait (Bellocchio, 2021)
Bellocchio also shared a personal statement ahead of the retrospective, which one can read below.
The films I chose all have a movement within them, which ends in very different way, but they always tell about women and men who want change your life and this change has very different outcomes…
For example, in Leap into the Void the sister “frees herself” and the brother commits suicide.
In Fists in the Pocket, Alessandro succumbs to his own “family revolution”…
In Buongiorno, notte, [Good Morning, Night], the liberation of the hostage is a dream, but it is more real of his actual assassination.
In Marx Can Wait, the story is the suicide of a brother, but also the liberation of the survivors who by admitting their responsibilities (of not having understood) they separate from it.
In Diavolo in corpo [Devil in the Flesh], Giulia is “saved” from her depression, the temptation to throw himself like the judge in Leap into the Void, and leaves the boy he belongs to free in love.
Only in [Enrico IV], if you think about it, everything remains the same in the end. The deception is discovered, but nothing changes even if there is a final crime (in my version it is just a joke), but the subject, let’s remember, is not mine, but someone else’s, Luigi Pirandello.
With the most sincere and affectionate wishes.
Marco Bellocchio