Marco Bellocchio on his new film about the notorious kidnapping of a Jewish child

The octogenarian director, whose latest film dramatises the 19th-century abduction of Edgardo Mortara by the Vatican, has been plumbing the depths of the Italian psyche on screen for the past 60 years – and worries for the future of cinema

He’s 84, but could be 10 or even 20 years younger. In his jacket and open-necked shirt, he looks like a university professor, speaking animatedly (addressing me directly or via his interpreter), voice habitually a little raised, as if at the university lectern or on stage at a film festival Q&A.

The Italian director Marco Bellocchio began his career nearly 60 years ago with the low-budget family-dysfunction shocker Fists in the Pocket and carried indefatigably on chronicling the psychodrama of the Italian soul from a Freudian and Marxist point of view. Now he discusses his barnstorming film, a huge period costume-drama taken from Italian history: Rapito, or Kidnapped, based on Daniele Scalise’s nonfiction study The Mortara Case: The True Story of the Jewish Boy Kidnapped by the Pope.