Portobello [+lee también:
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ficha de la serie], Marco Bellocchio’s new series presented Out of Competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, is set to debut in 2026 on HBO Max where it will be available around the world, including in the promised launch markets, Italy and the UK, but excluding France and Germany. This HBO Original series will home in on one of the most sensational miscarriages of justice in Italy: the affair of TV presenter Enzo Tortora, an innocent man who tragically fell from grace. We chatted about the series with the director.

Cineuropa: Did the format of six one-hour episodes allow you to delve deeper into this complex case?
Marco Bellocchio: When the idea to make a film about Enzo Tortora came out, we knew it would be impossible to cover the entire affair. We were most interested in what happened before his arrest, and then the court cases up until his death. But we couldn’t cover all of that material in one single film. We needed it to be broken down into episodes. So opting for a series was the natural choice. Then we were faced with the dilemma of what to include, because even in a series you have to make choices and summarise in order to fit everything into six episodes.

What interested you the most about the “Tortora affair”: the human side or the links between crime, justice, media and show business?
There were a few themes which interested me. When it came to the screenplay and, later, the editing process, we worked hard to combine Enzo Tortora’s world – who identified with his most famous programme, Portobello – with that of the underground world in prison, where a handful of Camorra members watched his TV show regularly. Through a series of coincidences, these two worlds overlapped and a member of the Camorra, who was collaborating with the authorities, singled the journalist out.

In one scene, we see Tortora thundering against the trillions put forward by the government for rebuilding efforts following the 1980 earthquake, which ended up in the Camorra’s hands. Did he also make enemies among those politicians with close links to crime?
Tortora definitely wasn’t liked by the authorities, either on the left or on the right. And especially not by the Masonic world, which he criticised and fought against. And there were also those two coincidences: on the one hand, the fact he hadn’t shown on TV the doilies sent to him from prison or how Camorra member Giovanni Pandico hated him, and on the other, the diary featuring his name. But we later found out it was just someone with the same name as him. The informers came thick and fast, and on the basis of the statements they made, he was taken into custody and then sentenced. At the time, prosecutors didn’t need to obtain confirmation of three informers’ testimonies in order to take someone to court.

And he immediately ended up pilloried by the media…
The journalists who singled him out as guilty were like a second firing line. They were jealous of his success: Portobello’s audience peaked at 28 million viewers.

It seems like a typical, universal story about a TV star who falls from grace, for some reason or another.
It’s interesting spending time here in Venice, because it helps me work out whether a non-Italian audience would be interested in this story ahead of HBO presenting the series all over the world.

You’ve turned to Fabrizio Gifuni once again - who you already made two films with - to play Tortora. What’s your experience of this brilliant actor?
Gifuni needs time to carry out detailed research and analyse characters. He probably studied Tortora more than I did. When it comes to shooting, that kind of in-depth research helps you to really let go, in a way you don’t often see, which is crucial for bringing a character to life. The shooting phase obviously brings unexpected developments and surprises, and things you need to change. His preparatory work didn’t stop him from being free in so many moments during filming. In fact, there’s some overlap between his performances as Aldo Moro in Exterior Night [+lee también:
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entrevista: Marco Bellocchio
ficha de la serie] and Tortora, because the latter really homed in, on TV, on Moro’s kidnap and murder by Red Brigades terrorists. He’d already spoken out back in 1969 about the massacre at Piazza Fontana in Milan, launching a ferocious attack on the anarchist Pietro Valpreda who’d been arrested for having planted the bomb and who was later exonerated. When Tortora’s turn came, Valpreda was quick to comment.