Marco Bellocchio on his new film about the notorious kidnapping of a Jewish child

He’s 84, but could be 10 or even 20 years younger. In his jacket and open-necked shirt, he looks like a university professor, speaking animatedly (addressing me directly or via his interpreter), voice habitually a little raised, as if at the university lectern or on stage at a film festival Q&A.

The Italian director Marco Bellocchio began his career nearly 60 years ago with the low-budget family-dysfunction shocker Fists in the Pocket and carried indefatigably on chronicling the psychodrama of the Italian soul from a Freudian and Marxist point of view. Now he discusses his barnstorming film, a huge period costume-drama taken from Italian history: Rapito, or Kidnapped, based on Daniele Scalise’s nonfiction study The Mortara Case: The True Story of the Jewish Boy Kidnapped by the Pope.

Kidnapped is a gripping full-tilt melodrama with something of Victor Hugo or Charles Dickens: the true story of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish boy in Bologna in the mid-19th century, who during an infant illness was secretly baptised as a Christian by a zealous Catholic nursemaid. She later told the Inquisition, which chillingly had this “Christian” child taken away from the devastated parents. Mortara grows up to be a priest and a fierce partisan of the church. His subsequent heart-rending meetings with his mother culminate in the most un-Hollywood ending I can remember for many years.

What brought Bellocchio to this sensational, painful story? “I came across it by chance in [Scalise’s] book – not the one that Spielberg used,” he adds. (Steven Spielberg has been developing his own, English-language version of the story, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, since 2014, based David Kertzer’s book of the same title, with Mark Rylance slated to play Pope Pius IX – it will be intriguing to see how he handles the ending.) “What really attracted me was the historical period and the emotive story arc. It resonated with my ideas about stubborn beliefs and dogmatic actions. And this was a crucial moment in Italian history, and as with all such moments, there are innocent victims. It became very important to me.”

And that image of the kidnapping: the cruelty, the cynicism, the despoiling of innocence … could it be that Bellocchio was attracted to the story for the same reasons he has been famously preoccupied by the kidnapping (and murder) of Italian politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978, a story Bellocchio has brought to the screen three times: in his 1995 TV documentary Broken Dreams, about the Red Brigades; his 2003 drama Good Morning, Night, about a young terrorist involved in the abduction; and his TV drama series about the kidnapping, Exterior Night, from 2022.

Bellocchio nods vigorously. “Something in it triggers the emotions. Its psychological and physical violence fires my imagination. There must be something there … without wanting to make this a psychotherapy session. It may not be obvious to you what a watershed moment the Moro case was to Italy. This was our Kennedy assassination! After that the political parties fragmented and splintered.”

Bellocchio says Moro was killed because he supported the “historic compromise” – the proposed alliance between the Italian communist party and the Christian Democrats, which was loathed by the Soviets because of a feared mainstream dilution of communism, and feared by the US because of a perceived fifth-column normalisation of the radical left. “Moro would have reformed the Italian state. But it didn’t happen.”

But there’s another resonance, I point out, one that has arisen since he made the film. Are his audiences seeing a parallel between the kidnapped Jewish boy and the Israeli hostages taken on 7 October? “When this movie was shot that was not an issue,” he says, “and it was shown in Italy before 7 October. But it came out in France after 7 October. And France is a country with a big Jewish population, and a big Muslim population. But there was no negative reaction to the film.”

These audiences would – inevitably – have seen the parallel? “There are some imponderable factors at play,” says Bellocchio. “When somebody goes to the cinema to see this film they cannot un-know or forget Gaza, or anything else going in the world.”

How about his own status as an elder of Italian cinema, the last working member of the great generation that included Pasolini, Bertolucci and Antonioni? Along with Ken Loach, Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott, he is now a vigorous octogenarian. Bellocchio laughs and disputes with his interpreter for a moment whether he is one of the ancieni or the persone mature. “A lot of colleagues from my generation are sadly no longer with us. But paradoxically it feels a lot more liberated for me now than when I was 30. I was always thinking … oh, can I make a career of this? My imagination as an artist feels freer now.”

As someone who has worked in both cinema and streaming TV, does he think that cinema is in crisis? Bellocchio becomes, if anything, more vehement and animated. “Who knows about the future of film? You should ask prophets or philosophers! What I’m really concerned about is a crisis of imagination. Film-makers go for a rococo redundancy. You can hear them saying: ‘Oh I’m so good – I can shock you and make you say “Ha!” in this moment!’”