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.

Winner of the FIPRESCI award, this haunting portmanteau from director Marco Bellocchio is a shrewd social commentary steeped in striking gothic imagery. Set in a convent-prison, the film shifts from past to present, crafting a story that is a love letter to Italy’s past and a critique of its stasis.

Once again, a mother-son relationship takes center stage in Marco Bellocchio’s volatile short, in which a revival of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci erupts in explosive confrontations. Operatic in its expression, this vortex of raw emotions evokes the eternal tension between money and art-making.

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.