The Cannes Film Festival 2021 has unveiled its second Palme d’Or: after the announcement of the Lifetime Achievement Award to Jodie Foster, the news has come that Marco Bellocchio will be awarded on the Croisette on Saturday 17 July, the day the Festival closes, with the Golden palm of honor.
Political and social commitment
A name, that of Marco Bellocchio, who has always stood out for the originality and the political and social commitment of his works, as the president of the review Pierre Lescure underlined: “He has always questioned institutions, traditions, personal and collective history. In each of his works, almost involuntarily, or at least in the most natural way possible, he revolutionized the established order ».
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In 1965, at the age of only twenty-six, he made his first feature film, “Fists in the pocket”, a great example of courage, expressive power and narrative maturity, very rare to find in a debut: a cross-section of the Italian province (Piacenza in this case ), painted without indulgences and which still does not leave indifferent today.
In the seventies he directed a great Gian Maria Volonté in “Beat the monster on the front page” (1972), a document that does not discount a very turbulent era and that reveals itself as an anticipation of the problems of information management in Italy; followed by “Nel nome del padre” (1972), post-sixty-eight allegory, and “Matti da un untie”, documentary, co-directed with Silvano Agosti, Stefano Rulli and Sandro Petraglia, which reflects with extreme sensitivity and delicacy on the condition of the mentally ill .
With «Leap into the void» (1980), another portrait of the declining bourgeoisie, he was (indirectly) awarded on the Croisette, where the two interpreters Michel Piccoli and Anouk Aiméè win in their respective categories. The production of the Eighties and Nineties is received with fluctuating judgments from critics and the public, but in the 2000s Marco Bellocchio returns to strike with “L’ora di religion” (2002), a mature and fascinating work on atheism and Christianity, directed in a splendid way and presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it receives a special mention from the ecumenical jury.