Marco Bellocchio: ‘Direct Reality Fascinates Me But it Isn’t Enough’

variety.com:

Lise Pedersen Italian director, screenwriter and producer Marco Bellocchio has opened up about his career and upcoming projects during a masterclass at the 53rd edition of Visions du Réel, where he received an honorary award.The 82-year-old master is guest of honor at the documentary film festival, which includes a retrospective of a dozen of his works and a screening of his latest film, “Marx Can Wait,” a documentary about his twin brother Camilo’s suicide in December 1968.

Featuring footage filmed during a family get-together, personal archive material and clips from his films, it is an intimate and poignant documentary that explores how his brother’s death deeply influenced Bellocchio’s work over the decades.

At the time, Bellocchio explained, “the revolution of ’68 was underway, there were protests and riots, and I said to myself ‘I have to do something.’ So in September, together with friends who had founded the Maoist movement, we had the first fully organized groups – I was deeply involved in this movement.”So obsessed was Bellocchio with defending his political cause that he didn’t hear his brother’s distress call. “I just told him: ‘The only way out of desperation is political engagement, serving the people is the only way to find your own identity and finally see life through a revolutionary perspective – and Camilo replied, ‘Well, Marx can wait.’ He was trying to tell me, ‘You have understood nothing of my despair,’ ” said Bellocchio, who later used that very sentence in his 1982 feature “The Eyes, The Mouth.” Asked about his upcoming projects, Bellocchio said he was working on a film which Steven Spielberg had originally planned to make, about the notorious Catholic kidnapping of a Jewish boy in 1858..