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About the film:
Marco Bellocchio and the Cannes Festival have loved one another for years. Nine of his features have been selected here, the two most recent being My Mother's Smile in 2002 and The Wedding Director in 2006. In 2007, he served on the Jury. Now, the Italian filmmaker returns to the Competition to present Vincere, which sheds light on an obscure aspect of Mussolini's private life. Before the outbreak of World War I, the future fascist dictator, an Italian soldier and a fervent Socialist, lived a double life. In addition to his wife, he had a mistress, Ida Dalser. She gave birth to a son by him, Benito Albino, whom he recognized and then denied. In the postwar years, when Mussolini was chief of the Italian state, young Ida continually petitioned for her rights as legitimate wife of Il Duce and mother of his eldest son, but she was always brutally pushed aside. Her child was institutionalized.

Giovanna Mezzogiorno stars as Ida. She has also appeared in One Last Kiss (2001) and Last Chance Saloon (2004). Bellocchio outlines his intentions in making Vincere, stating: "I wasn’t interested in highlighting and exposing the vileness of the Fascist regime. However, I was greatly struck by this woman and her absolute refusal to accept any kind of compromise. After all, she could have agreed to go back into the shadows and perhaps, may have been generously rewarded, which happened with so many other mistresses of Mussolini’s. But she wouldn’t accept that. She wanted to lay claim to an identity of her own. She couldn’t bring herself to accept the betrayal of this man, one whom, as she wrote in her letters, she had loved deeply and to whom she had given everything including all her assets."

Press conference:
Marco Bellocchio, presenting his feature Vincere in Competition, and leading actors Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Filippo Timi, as well as producer Mario Gianani, fielded questions from the press. Highlights follow.

Marco Bellocchio on what motivated him to make the film :
"This woman's passion is something that is quite original. One usually hears about people like Matteotti, Gramsci, and others, who belonged to parties opposing fascism. But they are heroes or martyrs. Ida is a woman who fell madly in love with Mussolini; she even shared his ideas. And when he cast her aside, she refused to be abandoned, and began her struggle. She's a tragic heroine. There are books that have dealt with this story, and even a documentary. And so I wanted to actually make a film."

Giovanna Mezzogiorno on how she approached her character:
"The main difficulty that I encountered was not transforming Ida's story into the story of a madwoman, which would have been easy to do. I believed that I had to emphasize some very special aspects of this woman's personality. First of all, her contradictions. She could be interpreted as having been a modern woman, even a kind of feminist. And yet, she sacrificed her whole life for a man. That's a contradiction… She's a very determined woman, and very lucid. She has a clear idea of what she wants to do. And there's another contradiction: she's not very calculating, she's not very bright, in a sense, because otherwise, she would have avoided this tragic destiny. She's rather naïve. In a way, she's blind. She can only see her final goal or target, but she doesn't realize she's heading for disaster. All of those contradictions brought together led me, with Marco, to create a character who was not mad or hysterical. On the contrary, I wanted to play a woman who had an obsession, which causes her to develop a mania or a kind of psychosis, a syndrome represented by her refusal to be abandoned… She was a woman with a great deal of class. She was extremely dignified; she wasn't vulgar in any way… I was really convinced that Ida had to be played in a very physical way, because she's got a kind of animal side to her. She's not an intellectual; she's a woman of action, rather like a hunting dog. I didn't have a single easy day during the shooting of the film… Every minute of the shoot was really tough and complex."

Marco Bellocchio on the truth of the facts:
"It is a true story. All the situations are based on an event that really happened. Of course, we don't have the detailed descriptions in the documents, so we had to imagine certain parts, but we always took them from real occurrences, some of which we learned of at the last minute. There's a scene where she takes out a revolver and says to her son, 'There's only one bullet, and it's for your father's heart.' And in the screenplay, there wasn't this scene. On the last day, an old woman from Trente told us this little story, and so we incorporated it into the film immediately."

Filippo Timi on his approach to his character:
"One of the most difficult things was to come out of this role at the end… My role was to make human a historical character… Marco never asked me to imitate Mussolini. The real challenge in playing this part in Italy, in addition, it was almost impossible for me. Mussolini, like all great dictators had the great strength of contradiction. A normal human being, when he contradicts himself, loses his credibility. This was a kind of schizophrenic way of working, having love scenes with Giovanna, for instance, which was easy and spontaneous, but then immediately after this, I had to change. The mood was totally different… This is something I couldn't shed at the end of the day. When you have such a strong role to play, it's very difficult afterwards to come back to more pastel colors."