Blood of My Blood
Description
Restless currents ripple the limpid surfaces of this intoxicating, serpentine drama by Italy’s renowned Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket, SFIFF 1966). Amid an erotically charged landscape of medieval certitudes and cruelties, anguished soldier Federico arrives at a convent where the woman accused of plotting with Satan to destroy his brother, a priest, awaits her inquisitors and torture. But he, too, is tempted by the beauty of Sister Benedetta, who knows only he can save her. Three hundred years later, a shady inspector, also named Federico, accompanies a Russian millionaire to the door of the former convent, now a dilapidated home (and hot property) of a reclusive, aging count of vampiric reputation. World-weary but still snared by desire, the count fairly haunts a town mired in old world corruption as it slides reluctantly into the internet age. These twists in plot and tone are less random than they appear. Indeed, set in Bobbio, near Bellocchio’s hometown of Piacenza, the eccentric story line mixes universal and deeply personal concerns, as it mulls the persistence of the past and its horrors in a mesh of confused but vaguely karmic recurrences. —Robert Avila
In 1965, then-26-year-old Marco Bellocchio (b. 1939), a former philosophy student turned filmmaker, made an explosive and lasting impact on Italian film and culture with his brilliant and blistering debut film, Fists in the Pocket (SFIFF 1966)—sending shock waves well beyond Italy and presaging a larger revolt in the political uprisings of 1968. A one-time Communist and a key figure, along with friends Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci, in the generation that moved Italy and the world beyond neorealism, Bellocchio has had a prolific career as a broodingly passionate dissector of a still disintegrating bourgeois world. His many other films include China Is Near (1967); In the Name of the Father (SFIFF 1971); Victory March (SFIFF 1976); four films made in collaboration with his psychoanalyst, Massimo Faggioli: Devil in the Flesh (1986), Sabbath (1988), The Conviction (1991) and The Dream of the Butterfly (1994); La Macchina Cinema (SFIFF 1981); My Mother’s Smile (2002) and Good Morning, Night (2003).
Trailer
//player.vimeo.com/video/157228590?autoplay=1Film Details
Language Italian
Year 2015
Runtime 107
Country Italy/France/Switzerland
Director Marco Bellocchio
Producer Simone Gattoni, Beppe Caschetto
Writer Marco Bellocchio
Editor Francesco Calvelli, Claudio Misantoni
Cinematographer Daniele Ciprì
Music Carlo Crivelli
Cast Roberto Herlitzka, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio, Alba Rohrwacher, Filippo Timi