“At moments KIDNAPPED feels old-fashioned. Yet Bellocchio never falls into boring costume drama realism. Working in a painterly style, he pushes things toward the operatic.”
—NPR

“The director, Marco Bellocchio, anchors the period with a somber visual elegance and employs surreal gestures to tease out the psychological and spiritual aspects of the tragedy.”
—New York Times

From 84-year-old arthouse cinema legend Marco Bellocchio (CHINA IS NEAR, FISTS IN THE POCKET, DEVIL IN THE FLESH, VINCERE) comes a film of 19th-century injustice and rage. In 1858, in the Jewish quarter of Bologna, the Pope’s soldiers burst into the home of the Mortara family. By order of the cardinal, they have come to take Edgardo, their seven-year-old son. The child had been secretly baptized by his nurse as a baby and the papal law is unquestionable: he must receive a Catholic education. Edgardo’s parents, distraught, will do anything to get their son back. Supported by public opinion and the international Jewish community, the Mortaras’ struggle quickly takes a political dimension. But the Church and the Pope will not agree to return the child, to consolidate an increasingly wavering power…