Nanni Moretti is quite probably Italy’s most prolific (and most heavily awarded) living director – and his style is unmistakable: often casting himself as the lead character in bubbly, semi-autobiographical comedies that are steeped both in an encyclopedic cinephilia (Moretti also famously owning a small arthouse cinema called the Nuovo Sacher) and leftwing political satire. And as any true auteur that conjugates the same number of fixed details into a signature, all of this is also true of his latest film, A Brighter Tomorrow (Il Sol Dell’avvenire), which had its international premiere at last year’s outing of the Cannes Film Festival: which sees Moretti in the role of Giovanni, a director struggling to finish a feature film about how the Italian Communist Party (a topic that he also explored in his 1990 documentary, La Cosa*) supported the popular Hungarian Uprising against the Soviets in 1956 while his producer-wife is both attempting to divorce him, and working on a Netflix film in parallel.

Flavia Dima

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Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.

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