Marco Bellocchio:
"Taking risks with images is my job."

In Marco Bellocchio's latest film, $My Mother's Smile$, young Leonardo asks his father, Ernesto, the meaning of consistency, and he replies that it is "Always doing what you have said you will do." Consistency between words and actions: here is a constant value which typifies the 40-year career of a filmmaker who, during a course which has been tumultuous, contradictory, deviating, perhaps incongruent, full of twists and turns and stops and reversals, has always remained true to himself, even when he was forced to clash with himself.

Since 1965, when the first film of the 26-year-old Piacenza native, $Fists in the Pocket$, fell like a bomb on Italian cinema, blowing up from its very foundations the family (as a value and an institution), Marco Bellocchio has never stopped searching, through his films, for the deeper meaning of existence (his own existence), in order to be able to approach and understand the existence of others and of the world. This never-ending adventure in search of the truth has led him along dangerous paths, to the indistinct limits between what is (or what society considers to be) normal and that which is different, diverging: the Other.

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