Blood of My Blood

From Italian master Marco Bellocchio, FIPRESCI prizewinner Blood of My Blood pairs two haunting stories from the past and the present, bound together by a convent prison in Bobbio (the director’s hometown and setting of his 1965 debut masterpiece, Fists in the Pocket). During the Inquisition period, Federico (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio) witnesses the harrowing trial of Benedetta (Lidiya Liberman), an alluring nun accused of seducing and driving his brother to suicide. Centuries later, a vampiric old man (Roberto Herlitzka) hides within the convent’s abandoned walls and faces eviction when a tax investigator and Russian millionaire come to purchase the property. Amid painterly lensing and an expressive score, the film is a gothic, shrewdly comic, and, above all, mystifying tapestry that mines the complexities of Italian life—whether in the cloistered darkness of the 17th century or in the confused, garish revelry of the present.