A film about the secret son of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini is Italy's only entry for this year's Cannes Film festival.
The film, Vincere, will be the sixth bid for the Palme d'Or for director Marco Bellocchio, 68.
As Bellocchio recounts, the future Fascist strongman was an ardent Socialist when he met and married Ida Dalser, a Milanese beauty salon owner who supported the often penniless political agitator.
First one of his many mistresses, Dalser became Mussolini's first wife in 1914 and bore him Benito Albino Mussolini in 1915.
They would both end up 'non-persons' in the Fascist years and eventually die in internment after Dalser's untiring efforts to have have her son recognised.
''What fascinated me about Ida Dalser was that heroines are usually sympathetic characters while she was a real ballbreaker,'' Bellocchio said Thursday.
Dalser split with Mussolini the same year Albino was born when he got hitched to second wife Rachele Guidi.
After numerous dalliances with intellectuals, Mussolini chose a more down-to-earth, hometown woman to become his 'official' wife.
Guidi bore him two daughters and three sons including the concert-pianist father of today's rightwing MP Alessandra Mussolini.
FIRST RECOGNISED THEN 'DISAPPEARED'.
Mussolini at first recognised Dalser's son, Benito Albino, but after his rise to power had him and later Dalser interned.
The son died in a Milan asylum in 1942 at the age of 27, five years after his mother, who had been sent to a Venetian island after threatening to expose unsavoury details about Mussolini's past.
The Fascist cover-up was so effective that proof of their existence and the marriage was only clinched by an investigative journalist in 2005.
The second part of Bellocchio's film highlights the increasing desperation of Dalser, played by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, and her son, played by Filippo Timi, and Mussolini appears mainly in newsreel footage - although Timi plays him earlier on.
A similar mix was used by Bellocchio in his acclaimed retelling of the kidnapping and murder of Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro, Buongiorno Notte (Good Morning, Night, 2003).
The title of the film, Win! was one of Mussolini's favourite battle cries when he threw his weight behind WWI as a young Socialist newspaper editor, later going to fight at the front.
Bellocchio is a leftwing director who first broke through with an anti-establishment picture called Fists In The Pocket in 1965 and has made a number of controversial films since.
He won a 'little Golden Lion' in Venice for Buongiorno, Notte, one of five of his films that have received nominations for the top prize at Cannes.
Bellocchio faces competition from, among others, Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards, Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, Pedro Almodovar's Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces), Ken Loach's Looking for Eric (about a soccer-mad postman who gets life training from Eric Cantona), and Lars von Trier's Antichrist.
Italian actress Asia Argento is on the jury led by French actress Isabelle Huppert.
The fest runs from May 13 to 24.
The official poster is an iconic image of Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960).
