Kidnapped follows the true story of how a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, was taken by the Catholic Church.

The year is 1858. Following Pope Pius IX’s orders, soldiers burst into the Mortara family’s Bologna home to forcibly remove their six-year-old son Edgardo, because they’d heard he had been baptised. 

The distraught Mortara family try desperately to get Edgardo back, and the scandal soon makes its way across the country and Europe at large.

As they embark on an international campaign to have their son returned, they find themselves at the epicentre of a wider historical battle between Catholic authoritarianism and the political awakening taking place throughout Europe.

Veteran Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio, brings a problematic part of his nation’s past to the screen, which stands as a testament to the perennial need, and the courage it requires, to resist totalitarianism.

‘A gripping, heartbreaking true-political crime story from the pages of history, with the passionate vehemence of Victor Hugo or Charles Dickens’ – The Gaurdian ★★★★★