SYNOPSIS

Federico, a young man-at-arms, also succumbs as his twin brother, a young priest, to Sister Benedetta’s charms. She will be condemned to be walled up alive inside the ancient Bobbio prison. At the present day the tax investigator Federico Mai discovers that a secretive old man has been living in Bobbio prison for year. He is only occasionally seen out at night, and is referred to as “The Count”.

DIRECTOR’S COMMENTS

BLOOD OF MY BLOOD was born from the accidental discovery of the ancient prisons of Bobbio, built in the nineteenth-century in a wing of the S. Colombano convent.
I discovered it in 2009 during my workshop for young people –Fare Cinema (Making Movies) that we have been organizing there since 1995.
It inspired in me the story of Benedetta, a nun buried alive in the Santa Chiara convent prison. It seemed to me that this story unearthed from a past so remote deserved a return to the present of today‘s Italy, a provincial Italy that modernity and globalization have erased. The film highlights a number of themes shared with other films of mine, such as The Mai Sisters – a work particularly dear to me – also set in Bobbio. The films’ endings are similar: a love for the past and the need to make a clean break with it.
BLOOD OF MY BLOOD is a kind of showdown. One of its themes is a brother mourning a brother. I had already told the tragedy of my twin brother committing suicide in The Eyes, The Mouth. Here, indirectly, is the same tragedy – Federico’s brother died for love. This inspires revenge in the surviving brother, but he will be seduced by the same woman.
A history set in 1630 that gives me the freedom to come back to my personal tragedy without being “persecuted” by my biography. BLOOD OF MY BLOOD is a quirky film, but it has a certain freedom, where past and present meet…

Marco Bellocchio