Marx Can Wait

In his most achingly personal film to date, MARX CAN WAIT finds legendary Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio using the occasion of a family reunion in his hometown of Piacenza to excavate and discuss a traumatic event: the death of his twin brother Camillo, who committed suicide in the late ’60s at age 29. Through detailed conversations with his siblings, archival footage providing context about 20th-century Italian leftist politics, and occasional clips from his films, many of which were in some way imbued with this defining family tragedy, Bellocchio conducts a personal and historical exorcism. Reckoning with the push-pull the director has long felt between the twin poles of family and politics, MARX CAN WAIT is an attempt at reconciliation and understanding from a filmmaker in his eighties whose work has never shied away from the challenging or the provocative.