Marco Bellocchio on Depicting Trauma and Dilemma Posed by Aldo Moro’s Kidnapping in TV Series ‘Exterior Night’
variety.comNick Vivarelli International CorrespondentVeteran Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio returned to Cannes this year with “Exterior Night,” a limited TV series about the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigades terrorists that, prior to playing on pubcaster RAI, is now on release in two installments via Lucky Red in Italian cinemas where it’s doing quite well.Bellocchio, who previously recounted Moro’s still-mysterious abduction in the 2005 film “Goodmorning, Night” from the viewpoint of one of his captors, is taking a different narrative approach in this series consisting of six one-hour episodes that reconstruct the 55 days of Moro’s imprisonment from different points of view, including that of his family, his fellow high-echelon Christian Democrat politicians, and the ailing Pope Paul VI, played by Toni Servillo.
He spoke to Variety about what drove him to revisit Italy’s deepest recent collective trauma and why he thinks the crucial issue of whether the Italian government should have negotiated with the Red Brigades to try and save Moro remains an open question.
Excerpts.In my work I’ve always finished something and then gone on to something else. But in this case, I got these sort of warning signals connected to the 40th anniversary of Moro’s death (in 2018) because the spotlight returned to this topic, the massacre and his killing, in a massive way. [It ended tragically with Moro’s bullet-riddled body found in the trunk of a parked car in downtown Rome.
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