Across 6 decades Italian maestro Marco Bellocchio has made some of the great masterworks of his homeland’s cinema—this sublime 2016 entry finds him in a tender register, examining the eternal bonds between mother and son. A perceptive look at the ties that bind and the long shadow cast by childhood.

A young partisan drifts through clashing epochs in Marco Bellocchio’s magical-realist short, a poignant ode to the 1940s resistance movement in his Italian hometown of Bobbio. At once a historical witness and a symbol of rebirth, the beautiful Trebbia river provides a beguiling portal to the past.