The Israel Film Center inside the JCC at 334 Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan will be showing the 2023 Italian historical drama Kidnapped tomorrow, May 15, at 7pm.
The 134-minutes-long Italian-language production directed by Marco Bellocchio is loosely based on Daniele Scalise’s book Il Caso Mortara.
The movie is set in 1858 in the Jewish quarter of Italian city Bologna and focuses on the abduction of seven-year-old Edgardo Mortara by the Pope’s soldiers.
“The child had been secretly baptized by his nurse as a baby and the papal law is unquestionable: he must receive a Catholic education,” reads an official synopsis. “Edgardo’s parents, distraught, will do anything to retrieve their child from the clutches of a ruthless theocratic government, painting a personal narrative of a family in crisis and a wide-scope portrait of a country on the cusp of revolution.”
Rapito, the film’s original title, premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival last year and was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or, the highest prize awarded as the festival. It eventually lost to France’s Anatomy of a Fall.
Tickets to this week’s screening are available on the JCC’s website right here for a little over $17.
