VENICE FILM FEST HONORS RISK-TAKING MARCO BELLOCCHIO

VENICE FILM FEST HONORS RISK-TAKING MARCO BELLOCCHIO

(ANSA) - Venice, September 9 - Recalling the days before he was famous, iconic Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio once said that the great advantage of first films is the director's anonymity.

"You're nobody and you have no history," he said. "You have the freedom to risk everything".

Today, Bellocchio is somebody, and the Venice Film Festival has noticed, awarding Bellocchio the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement on Friday, to be presented by none other than fellow Italian film great Bernardo Bertolucci, who won the same award in 2007.

"I am honored and moved by the fact Bernardo Bertolucci will award me the Lion," says Bellocchio. "Even though we have followed different paths, there have always been mutual interest, esteem and affection between us".

It could be said that both the careers of Bellocchio and Bertolucci, of Last Tango in Paris fame, are marked by an enduring penchant for risk-taking, despite their success and accolades.

"With every new film, Marco Bellocchio takes us to destinations ever different from those we thought we'd reached and discovered," says Marco Mueller, Venice Film Festival Director, calling the auteur a "tireless traveller" and a "ferryman of ideas".

Known for his politically militant cinema, he was a friend of Pasolini and made a significant impact on radical Italian cinema throughout the 1970s.

Bellocchio, 72, who is also an actor and screenwriter, made his directorial debut in 1965 with I Pugni in Tasca (Fists in the Pocket).

His most recent film, Vincere, released in 2009, was based on a story about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's secret lover and illegitimate son and won international acclaim, placing Bellocchio among "the major Italian screen directors still active today," according to festival organizers.

A new version of Bellocchio's classic film Nel Nome del Padre (In the Name of the Father, 1971) will be screened at the festival, following the awards ceremony for the Golden Lion, in the newly restored Sala Grande at the Palazzo del Cinema on the Venetian island of Lido.

This version is not a restoration, but an entirely new, "current" work, according to Bellocchio, who culled a shorter, 90 minute director's cut from the original 115 minute film.

"Freedom of imagination was unthinkable back then," Bellocchio says. "I needed to liberate the movie from its ideological weight, eliminating many of the judgements, explanations and quotations in favour of story, characters, and relationships".

"Back then I felt an obligation not to betray my leftist militancy. Liberating the image means privileging the paradoxical, surreal, cruel even, aspects of institutional hypocrisy," Bellocchio adds.

"The film's content and meaning remain unchanged. I would say that in its new version, In The Name of the Father is a little less Brecht, a little more Vigo".

"Previous winners of the Golden Lion career prize include David Lynch, Clint Eastwood, Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola and Charlie Chaplin.

Last year's prize last was won by cult Hong Kong film director and producer John Woo.