Solid, stately and — like the collapsing Papal States of the Italian Peninsula in the late 1800s — just a little too tradition-bound for its own good, Marco Bellocchio’s “Kidnapped,” based on a 19th-century case of religious abduction, opens with an eavesdrop. Anna (Aurora Camatti), the Catholic servant to the…
Marco Bellocchio

Sales agency The Match Factory is launching the trailer (below) of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s “Fallen Leaves,” which will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in Competition. This gentle tragicomedy is the fourth part of Kaurismäki’s working-class quartet, following “Shadows in Paradise,” “Ariel” and “The Match Factory Girl,” which The…

Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer for Marco Bellocchio’s “Kidnapped” (Rapito), which has its world premiere in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The film starts in 1858 in the Jewish quarter of Bologna, when the Pope’s soldiers burst into the home of the Mortara family. By…

The Match Factory has boarded Sean Price Williams’s “The Sweet East,” which has its world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival in May. It is the first feature film directed by Price Williams, the cinematographer of Owen Kline’s “Funny Pages” (2022), Abel Ferrara’s “Zeros and…

Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio will be presented with the European Film Academy’s Award for European Innovative Storytelling for his miniseries “Exterior Night.” The director will be guest of honor at the 35th European Film Awards ceremony on Dec. 10 at Reykjavik. In “Exterior Night,” Bellocchio returns to the case of…