SYNOPSIS

Four siblings live with their blind mother in a villa in the Apennine Mountains in the Italian region of Emilia: Leone is mentally retarded; Alessandro suffers from epilepsy and has vivid dreams; Giulia is seemingly normal, but is in fact attracted to her brother, Augusto. Alessandro decides to free Augusto of the “abnormal” part of the family. He kills his mother first and then Leone as well, trusting in Giulia’s complicity. The astonishing and violent debut from Marco Bellocchio was a gleaming ice pick in the eye of bourgeois family values and Catholic morality.

DIRECTOR’S COMMENTS

I wanted to tell a very personal story in which I could recognise myself. I thought about a theme that threaded through my adolescence, the unhappy side of family life – featuring people like my brother, Paolo, who destroyed all possibility of happiness at home and made me hide myself away. There was this protagonist at the centre who wants to stay in the family and dominate it by getting rid of the brothers who are flawed and who are not productive. Then I created other characters, the mother inparticular. Certain things are drawn from my family, others from my imagination. I also drew from my culture, and a little from surrealism, literature, and from what my life had become. That’s how the story came into being.

Marco Bellocchio