Kidnapped Director Marco Bellocchio: I Could Only Think About Freedom

Veteran Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio discusses his compelling account of a real-life incident that pitted two cultures against each other.

On 23 June 1858, an official accompanied by guards showed up at the residence of Salomone Mortara, a respected Bologna businessman and member of the city’s Jewish community. It had been reported to the city’s inquisitor, Father Pier Feletti, that one of Mortara’s younger sons, Edgardo, had been administered an emergency baptism in secret some years before when he was gravely ill. No matter that he had been brought up Jewish, the boy was now considered Catholic and was ordered to be sequestered by the official – by force, if necessary. 

The following night, under more heavily fortified supervision, young Edgardo was taken away. The story became a cause célèbre throughout Europe, making its way to the stops of the Vatican, which saw Pope Pius IX vilified in some quarters. It also reached the US and is even regarded as cementing French Emperor Napoleon III’s support of the unification of Italy – the subject of a violent internal conflict that plays out towards the end of Bellocchio’s drama.

Kidnapped (2024)

It’s a bright spring morning and the Italian filmmaker is in London for a preview screening of Kidnapped – his adaptation of this much-publicised abduction – and, in his calm, commanding demeanour, he is every inch the maestro. He’s a writer-director who has played a key role in the Italian cinema industry for six decades, since the release of his 1965 feature directorial debut Fists in the Pocket. Kidnapped is Bellocchio’s first major UK release since his riveting 2019 Sicilian Mafia drama The Traitor (although the sprightly 84-year-old has made two features and a TV series in between), and it’s a sumptuously mounted film. 

However, even though it grabbed headlines in its day, the Mortara story is not one that Bellocchio was familiar with before the 2017 book Kidnapped by the Vatican? by the devoutly Catholic and conservative writer Vittorio Messori. ‘Upon reading the book, it struck me that it was not just a justification of the actions of the Catholic Church, but an obligation according to the tenets of the faith to remove this child who was “Catholic”, having been baptised by stealth,’ the filmmaker recalls, through a translator. The justification, in the eyes of the Vatican, was borne out when Edgardo became an adolescent and retained his Christian faith. ‘The miracle that they saw happening in his conversion, being imbued with the Holy Spirit, was shown to be true when he reached an age when he could have left, but chose not to,’ says Bellocchio. ‘What I saw was a way to present [Edgardo’s] early life – to show the machinery in play that would have such a powerful impact on his entire worldview. In essence, to show the other side of the argument.’

Kidnapped (2024)

Messori’s book is not the only account of what took place. The American writer David Kertzer published The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara in 1997, which Steven Spielberg had long been eyeing to adapt. Kertzer has also written about more recent cases that bear a striking similarity to what happened to Edgardo. Some of these other books are more scathing than Bellocchio’s film, which profits from its acknowledgement of just how incendiary the case was in its day, but keeps its focus confined to Edgardo’s own day-to-day experiences and the trauma felt by his family. ‘This is not an objective film, but instead of anger, I sought to reach an emotional level with the film, to capture the pain of parents who had their child physically, violently, torn away from them,’ Bellocchio says, ‘This reaches a high point in the scene when it dawns on Edgardo’s father that he has lost his son. In this moment, there are no words to articulate his feelings. Fausto [Russo Alesi] did magnificently in expressing Salomone’s despair and rage – something that erupts out of him.’

This isn’t Bellocchio’s first film to grapple with his country’s past. In Vincere (2009), he focused on the early life of Benito Mussolini, while in the celebrated Good Morning, Night (2003), he presented an account of the 1978 kidnapping of Italian politician and former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. (He would return to this event, albeit from a different perspective, with the 2022 TV series Exterior Night.) Like these earlier films, the unbridled emotions of the characters in Kidnapped are kept in check through the way Bellocchio and co-writer Susanna Nicchiarelli capture the era. 

‘An essential element in telling the story lay in defining the relationship between the micro (this family’s story) and the macro (the larger story of Italy that is unfolding around it),’ Bellocchio explains. ‘Susanna and I ensured that the history presented was as accurate as we could capture it. Budgetary restrictions prevented larger battle scenes. Instead, we chose to focus on specific moments that would convey the strife spreading across the country. The visuals capture the world, while the dialogue, used sparingly, keeps the story moving forward, ensuring that anything redundant is cast aside.’

Kidnapped (2024)

The film’s use of night scenes plays into this approach. On one level, shooting in Bologna at night enabled the crew to evade any contemporary visual references – new buildings, signs etc. At the same time, the darkness adds immeasurably to the film’s sense of foreboding and symbolises Catholic attitudes towards the Jewish community in Italy – subtly hinting at the way they were seen during that age. But in certain moments, the film moves away from realism towards the expressionist, with newspaper cartoons coming to life and a violent nightmare plaguing the Pope. 

This is best seen when young Edgardo is alone in a church and facing the figure of Christ. It accentuates the fervidity of the boy’s psychological and emotional state. ‘We wanted to capture what Edgardo might have been thinking and feeling at that point,’ the director says of the scene. ‘After all, his life, his whole world, had changed. And there was so much emphasis on this one individual whose figure, nailed on a cross, looms over him. With this scene [which is best seen without knowing what happens], I wanted to show the confusion of this boy, who in his mind as well as in his physical world, had two very different cultures vying for him. A priest who watched the film came up to me afterwards and asked why I had chosen the scene to play out the way it did. It seemed, in that moment, he was thinking about the concept of love. But for me, in the way I was thinking about Edgardo, I could only think about freedom.’