Marco Bellocchio became an overnight sensation in 1965 when Fists in the Pocket, the Italian director’s shocking portrait of disaffected youth and dysfunctional domestic life, premiered at Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. The feature, which had been rejected by Venice, was publicly pummelled by the Italian Christian Democratic Party and by his fellow film-makers Luis Buñuel and Michelangelo Antonioni as a Marxist attack on bourgeois family values.
What happened is maddening. One night in 1858, police arrived at the home of a Jewish family in Bologna, the Mortaras, and took their six-year-old son, Edgardo; authorities claimed that he was Catholic, as a maid had secretly baptised the boy, the sixth of eight children, when he fell sick during infancy, and must therefore be brought up by the church. Pope Pius IX was personally involved in Edgardo’s education even as his desperate family continued to appeal for his return.
Film director Marco Bellocchio at the 2023 Cannes film festival. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images “You are Irish, I am Italian; we understand the pervasive power and influence of the Catholic Church,” says the director, who has loosely based his feature on a book by the Italian author Daniele Scalise. “I’ve experienced the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland through films and books. They are in parallel with what happened in Italy. Great crimes and outrages were committed. They were not without victims.