Wednesday is Nanni Moretti’s day in Cannes, where his “Il sol dell’avvenire” is in competition. The 69-year-old Roman director is at home at the festival, in 1978 he presented his second film, “Ecce bombo” here, in 1994 “Caro diario” (from 1993) won the prize for best director, and triumph in 2001 with The Son’s Room, which won the Palme d’Or. A few days after his debut on the Croisette, the Roman director spoke about himself in an interview with the newspaper “La Stampa”, touching on many current issues, including the war in Ukraine.
“It always amazed me,” Moretti says, “that up until November 1989 (the year the Berlin Wall came down and the beginning of the end of the Italian Communist Party) the connection to the USSR and the countries of the bloc remained incredibly ingrained.” many on the left Soviet. Instead, I believe there are other reasons for today’s refusal to fully side with invaded Ukraine, such as anti-Americanism. But how can we safely declare ourselves supporters of Putin today, in 2023? It seems like an incredible thing to me, like total rolling pins.”
“The Sun of the Future” is a film that contains many films. There is what director Giovanni, played by Nanni Moretti himself, is filming while writing another – from the story “The Swimmer” by John Cheever – and dreaming up another – the love story of a fifty-year-old couple, told through Italian love songs – : a film about the crisis that shattered the Italian Communist Party after the “Budapest Spring” harshly repressed by Soviet troops in the fall of 1956. The similarities between the Russian invasion of Ukraine are hard to miss. “We finished the script in the summer of 2021,” recalls Moretti in an interview. I was expecting everything except that this dramatic and distant episode would suddenly and unpredictably resurface.” On current affairs, the director emphasizes, “I never cared. Instead, I often preceded her. A little luck, a little attention.’
Speaking of Nanni Moretti, one cannot avoid mentioning his political commitment, which has always been at the heart of the director’s life. For years engaged in left-wing politics (an engagement that produced the documentary Das Ding), “journey” to the sections of the PCI during the famous “Wende” of 1989, which will lead to its dissolution two years later, he remembered the head of the so-called “Girotondi”, a movement that emerged in 2002 during the Berlusconi government, when a group of citizens met in front of the communist Italian and his merger with the Democratic Party of the Left at the Palace of Justice in Milan to demand respect for the judiciary and to demand the constitution. However, the “gyros” also criticize the parties of the left because of their too great distance to society. The “j’accuse” Moretti launched during a demonstration by the centre-left Parliamentary Committee in Rome’s Piazza Navona against the leaders of Ulivo is famous. “We will never win with this ruling class,” he shouts from the stage.