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The Toronto Film Festival's TIFF Cinematheque is honoring revered Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio with a major retrospective titled "Marco Bellocchio: A Leap in the Dark," comprising 14 works from his six-decade career.
The prolific - and still very active - Bellocchio, who is 85, is considered the greatest living Italian director of the country's old guard that came of age during the 1960s.
Bellocchio's 1965 debut, the dysfunctional family drama "Fists in the Pocket" (pictured), was quite incendiary in its day, starring Lou Castel as a rich young epileptic tearing apart his family with fratricide, matricide and even suggested sister incest.
Ever since "Fists," Bellocchio has "with varying styles, delved head-on into the complexities of recent Italian history, fearlessly exploring the impacts of institutions -- family, state and church -- upon the individual, and political subversion," TIFF Cinematheque said in a statement. "While quintessentially Italian in their subjects, his films are also deeply personal and universal in their appeal."
Bellocchio made his mark in Cannes with psychological drama "A Leap in the Dark" (1980) which won best actor and actress honors for stars Michel Piccoli and Anouk Aimée, with the latter playing a woman fraught with depression and fantasies of suicide.
Subsequent titles - all included in the retro - include erotic psychodrama "Devil in the Flesh" (1986), political drama "Good Morning, Night" (2003) and the euthanasia-themed "Dormant Beauty" (2012).
More recently, in 2019, Bellocchio made "The Traitor," about the first high-ranking member of Cosa Nostra to break the Sicilian Mafia's oath of silence, a big-budget epic released in the U.S. by Sony Pictures Classics. And in 2023 he shot "Kidnapped," which reconstructs the true tale of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish boy who was kidnapped and forcibly raised as a Christian in 19th-century Italy.
The Jan. 10-29 retro, which includes a dedicated book, is programmed by TIFF Cinematheque senior curator Andréa Picard in collaboration with Italy's Cinecittà. "Marco Bellocchio: A Leap in the Dark" is presented by Italy's Istituto Italiano di Cultura (ICI) in Toronto with the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montréal. Bellocchio's son, actor and producer Pier Giorgio Bellocchio, will be on hand to introduce several of the screenings.