MARCO BELLOCCHIO

DIRECTING

Marco Bellocchio (Italian: [ˈmarko belˈlɔkkjo]; born 9 November 1939; Bobbio) is an Italian film director, screenwriter, and actor. Born in Bobbio, near Piacenza, Marco Bellocchio had a strict Catholic upbringing – his father was a lawyer, his mother a schoolteacher.

He began studying philosophy in Milan but then decided to enter film school, making his first film, Fists in the Pocket, (I pugni in tasca, winner of the Silver Sail at the 1965 Festival del film Locarno), funded by family members and shot on family property, in 1965. Bellocchio's films include China Is Near (1967), Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina (Slap the Monster on Page One) (1972), Nel Nome del Padre (In the name of the Father – a satire on a Catholic boarding school that shares affinities with Lindsay Anderson's If....) (1972), Victory March (1976), A Leap in the Dark (1980), Henry IV (1984), Devil in the Flesh (1986), and My Mother's Smile (2002), which told the story of a wealthy Italian artist, a 'default-Marxist and atheist', who suddenly discovers that the Vatican is proposing to make his detested mother a saint.