EL RAPTO

Marco Bellocchio

Italy, France, Germany

- 2023

National premiere

In 1858, in the Jewish quarter of Bologna, the Pope’s soldiers burst into the home of the Mortara family. By order of the cardinal, they have come to take Edgardo, their seven-year-old son. The child had been secretly baptized by his nurse as a baby and the papal law is unquestionable: he must receive a Catholic education. Edgardo’s parents, distraught, will do anything to get their son back.

Marco Bellocchio

Born in Piacenza, Italy, in 1939, he is one of the leading renewers of European cinema. In 1959 he abandoned philosophy studies at the Catholic University of Milan and enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Between 1961 and 1962 he made several short films and then moved to London, where he attended the Slade School of Fine Arts. Since ‘Fists in the Pocket’ (1965), his first feature film (awarded at Locarno), he has built a revolutionary body of work committed to the fight against conformism and bourgeois morality. His extensive career includes titles such as ‘Victory March’ (1976), ‘A Leap in the Dark’ (1980), ‘The Conviction’ (1991), ‘Good Morning, Night’ (2003), ‘Blood of My Blood’ (2015), ‘The Traitor’ (2019) or the miniseries ‘Esterno Notte’ (2002), which have won many awards at the main international festivals. He has received honorary awards throughout his career at Venice (2011), Locarno (2015) and Cannes (2021). His work has been the subject of dozens of retrospectives around the world, including one at MoMA (New York) in 2014 to commemorate his then fifty-year filmmaking career.