Marx Can Wait (2021, Documentary)

Synopsis

1968 was the year Camillo died. Nearly 50 years after the death of his twin brother at the age of 29, Marco Bellocchio gathers his family to reconstruct Camillo's disappearance.

Combining intimate conversations with the Bellocchio family and those who knew Camillo best with archival material, family movies and his own oeuvre, Marco attempts to manifest a ghost he has been dealing with his entire life.

What begins as a family conversation morphs into an investigation of grief, guilt and responsibility, compassion, empathy and love.



Cast: Marco Bellocchio, Alberto Bellocchio, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio


In his most achingly personal film to date, MARX CAN WAIT finds legendary Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio using the occasion of a family reunion in his hometown of Piacenza to excavate and discuss a traumatic event: the death his twin brother Camillo, who committed suicide in the late ’60s at age 29.

Through detailed conversations with his siblings, archival footage providing context about 20th-century Italian leftist politics, and occasional clips from his films, many of which were in some way imbued with this defining family tragedy, Bellocchio conducts a personal and historical exorcism.

Reckoning with the push-pull the director has long felt between the twin poles of family and politics, MARX CAN WAIT is an attempt at reconciliation and understanding from a filmmaker in his eighties whose work has never shied away from the challenging or the provocative. (Strand Releasing)

Read about this film