Marco Bellocchio

Born 1939, Piacenza, Emilia-Romagna, Italy.
The son of a lawyer and a schoolteacher, he had a strict Catholic upbringing in a bourgeois home. Having trained briefly as an actor, he interrupted his philosophy studies at Milan’s University of the Sacred Heart to study directing at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale film school and London’s Slade School of Arts. He directed several shorts and documentaries before making an auspicious debut as a feature director in 1965 with Fist in His Pocket, an award winner at the Locarno IFF. The film, a powerful comment on social decadence symbolized through a sordid tale of incestuous relations among a family as a microcosm of society and its ills – once more in his second feature, China Is Near, winner of both the Special Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1967 Venice IFF. The following year, however, he joined the extreme-left Communist Union and renounced fictional films for politically militant cinema. He became involved in the co-operative production of propaganda shorts and seemed lost to mainstream cinema. But he returned to features and his favorite anti-establishment allegorical themes with In the Name of the Father (1971). His handling of resulted in the awarding of Leap Into Void both the best actor and best actress prizes to the film’s stars, Michel Piccoli and Anouk Aimee, at the 1980 Cannes IFF.

Filmography
Ginepro fatto uomo (1962), La colpa e la pena (1965),  Fists in His Pocket (I Pugni in Tasca, 1965), China Is Near (La Cina è vicina,1967), In the Name of the Father (Nel nome del padre, 1972), Slap the Monster on Page One (Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina, 1972), Fit to Be Untied (Matti da slegare,1975), Victory March (Marcia trionfale, 1976), The Seagull (Il gabbiano, 1977), The Cinema Machine (La Macchina cinema, TV,1979), Vacation in Val Tribbia (Vacation in Val Tribbia,1980), A Leap in the Dark (Salto nel vuoto,1980), Those Eyes, That Mouth (Gli occhi, la bocca, 1982), Henry IV (1984), Devil in the Flesh (Il diavolo in corpo, 1986), The Sabbath (La visione del sabba, 1988), The Condemnation (La condanna, 1991), The Butterfly's Dream (Il sogno della farfalla, 1994), Broken Dreams (Sogni infranti,1995), The Prince of Homburg (Il Principe di Homburg, 1997), La religione della storia, (1998), The Nanny (La balia, 1999), Another World Is Possible (Un altro mondo è possibile, 2001), ... addio del passato... (TV, 2002), The Religion Hour (My Mother's Smile) (L' ora di religione (Il sorriso di mia madre), 2002), Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno, notte, 2003), The Director of Weddings (Il regista di matrimoni, 2006).