In 2021, Marco Bellocchio received a Honorary Palme d'or in tribute to his lifetime achievement and presented his highly personal and moving Marx Can Wait. This year he unveils Exterior Night, revisiting, after his 2003 film Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night), the assassination of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, which left a red-hot iron mark on Italian collective memory. 

Marco Bellocchio is a filmmaker protester who is forever questioning institutions and the established order. From his first film in Competition in 1980, A Leap in the Dark, to the masterful The Traitor in 2019, Marco Bellocchio has made an impression on the Festival de Cannes, and remains one of the great, contemporary Italian filmmakers who is capable of taking a deep, enlightened look at the history of his country.

Marco Bellocchio © Anna Camerlingo

1978. Italy is in the grip of a merciless war between the Red Brigades, a far-left armed organization, and the government, with riots, kidnappings, shootings, and attacks on the rise. The very first government supported by a communist party in the history of the West was about to take power, in an unprecedented alliance with the Christian Democrats, a bastion of traditional conservatism. 

Aldo Moro, the main architect of this agreement, was kidnapped on the day the new government took office, in an attack on the core of the state. He was held captive for 55 days, punctuated with Moro's letters and the Red Brigades’ communiqués, after which his dead body was found, left in a car in downtown Rome.