Revered Italian director, screenwriter and producer Marco Bellocchio received Vision du Réel’s highest honour before the April Swiss premiere of his latest documentary Marx Can Wait.
Among the laudators were VdR Artistic Director Emilie Bujès, Chicca Bergonzi, deputy director of the Cinémathèque suisse, and Marco Müller, former director of the Venice FF and Locarno FF who spoke in a video message from Shanghai.
On April 12, Bellocchio will give a masterclass, which can also be livestreamed (Tuesday, April 12 at 2:00 pm). Presented in partnership with the Cinémathèque suisse and the ECAL (Lausanne University of Art and Design), “this forum will be an opportunity to explore a body of work that demonstrates impressive liberty, interweaving fiction with documentary, the intimate with the collective,” writes the festival. The masterclass will be moderated by film critic Enrico Magrelli and Rebecca De Pas, member of the Festival’s selection committee.
Presenting the Visions du Réel Honorary Award April 11, Artistic Director Emilie Bujès said: “Marco Bellocchio exercises impressive liberty and modernity to combine registers of images and genres, moving between fiction and documentary, between the intimate and the collective, in a decidedly political cinema. We are extremely happy and delighted to pay tribute to an indisputable master of contemporary filmmaking, as well as to a body of work which, from the very first films, has demonstrated dazzling modernity, and is brooding, subversive and audacious, formidably eclectic.”
“Marco, you have already received so many awards, but the one from Visions du Réel has a particular importance, because it recognizes the precarious balance between fiction and documentary that is characteristic of your work and that began with The Fists in the Pockets,” said Marco Müller.
“I think of what your fiction films have made of reality – Buongiorno notte, Vincere and Il traditore. I think of what your documentaries have accomplished in terms of fiction – a film that has been close to my heart for a long time, Vacanze al Val Trebbia, the first part of your ‘documentary’ autobiography, where even dreams join the sphere of mise en scène. You were the founding father of this first and only season of the “new Italian cinema”, in which you had already defined your non-fictional way of making, mixing narrative and creative documentary and to make it the test bed of your practice and to look for the poetry that characterized your version of this “other cinema.” Congratulations, Master,” Müller continued.
Marx Can Wait is distributed by the Swiss Film Archive. Chicca Bergonzi, Assistant Director of the organisation, explained: “Marx può aspettare (Marx Can Wait), the family, your family, your story, again and again, without any filter or fictional narrative dimension this time. Bobbio, Val Trebbia, our common roots: discovering it last summer in Cannes, a punch, again, but with a lot of tenderness and love. In the faces, the gestures, the words, the inflections of your relatives, I found those of my father’s family, I saw my childhood again, I cried for those who are no longer there too.”
In addition to the masterclass and the Swiss premiere of Marx può aspettare, a selected retrospective will pay tribute to Marco Bellocchio during Visions du Réel. The partners of the invitation are the Swiss Film Archive and the ECAL (Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne).
