Marco Bellocchio

The movie is based on a true story. On 16 March 1978 Aldo Moro, the former Italian Prime Minister was kidnapped in Via Fani by the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), a militant Communist Italian group. He was the main supporter of the Compromesso Storico (Hystorical Compromise), which had to lead to the first Italian government supported by both the Christian Democrats and the Communists, in a period of social, economic and political crises. During the attack his five escort agents were all killed. Moro’s corpse was found on 9 May 1978 in a car parked in a street between the headquarters of the Christian Democrat Party and the Communist Party. This movie is inspired by this tragic event which traumatize the whole nation. Read More »

A merchant’s house in the Stockholm archipelago. Katha, an old woman comes here every year. So does her father, who once built the house. She wants the family, her children and their children to join her at Paradistorg. This leads to conflicts.Read More »

Elena (18), is on her first day at work in a bar in a small Apennine town of Bobbio. It’s summer and the bar is very busy.Read More »

Three young people leave the psychiatric hospital to lead a “normal life” while working in the factory. They confide in their future prospects. In 1968, alarmed by the catastrophic state of public psychiatry in Italy, the communist municipality of Parma entrusted Mario Tommasini, a former gas worker, with the management of the mental health sector and its reorganization in a revolutionary fashion. This political initiative, inspired by Franco Basaglia, critic of the asylum institution and the origin of Psychiatry outside the walls, marked the beginning of a vast undertaking of social integration of patients.Read More »

A sizzling, erotic thriller about a triangle between a teenage boy, an older woman an her fiance, an imprisoned terrorist, set in a world of intrigue, betrayal and erotic pleasure, from which may be no escape.Read More »

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. Supported by public opinion and the international Jewish community, the Mortaras’ struggle quickly take a political dimension. But the Church and the Pope will not agree to return the child, to consolidate an increasingly wavering power…Read More »

An Italian adaptation of The Sea Gull by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.
A young writer is trapped between his awful actress mother (Laura Betti) and the knowledge that he has only a mediocre talent as a playwright and almost no force of character. After the young man in this story suffers the loss of his mistress to his self-satisfied novelist stepfather, his self-respect is so shattered that he commits suicide.Read More »

In 1958 Angelo, a rich and spoiled boy, enters a religious school, where students are tired of its vice-rector, and the strict rules and old-fashioned teaching methods of priests. Soon, Angelo exerts strong leadership among his peers and incites turmoil among them, helped by intellectual Franco and shy Camma. They expel the prefect from the school, organize a Grand Guignol show, and disappear the corpse of an old professor.Read More »

Quote:
With the innocuously titled Sweet Dreams (Fai bei sogni), Italian director Marco Bellocchio stages a gentle, eminently watchable return to some of the key themes that have haunted his 50 years of filmmaking, particularly the scarring left by a dysfunctional family and maternal love gone awry. The story of a 9-year-old boy who loses his beloved mother is a much simpler, more direct film than the thematically rich My Mother’s Smile (2002), and has none of the churning family anger of Fists in His Pocket (1965). But based on journalist Massimo Gramellini’s best-selling autobiographical novel, it has an emotional unity and urgency that holds the attention, only flagging in the last innings of a surprisingly compact drama running well over two hours.Read More »