Nanni Moretti 

Italy
 

Moretti has consistently combined the personal and the political in his films, but where Caro Diario saw him undergoing chemotherapy for a mysterious tumour, Aprile finds Moretti confronting a different life-transforming shock – that of fatherhood. 

The film takes its title from a month in which Moretti faced both the new responsibilities of fatherhood and the expectations involved in the election of Italy's first left-wing government. Aprile starts in March, 1994, and spans two and a half years of social, state and personal upheaval before culminating in August 1997, Moretti's 43rd birthday.

Ever the left-oriented social observer, Moretti is seen in the film's opening minutes watching with his mother as an enthusiastic newscaster on one of Silvio Berlusconi's national TV networks lauds Berlusconi's election as Prime Minister of Italy. Moretti's reaction is to sit back and ignite a huge jazz cigarette. Over a year later, Berlusconi's right-wing government has been ousted and Moretti's partner, Sylvia Nono, is expecting their child. Moretti abandons his long-standing plans to make a musical set in the 50s about a Trotskyite pastry chef and instead responds to his own committed filmmaker's sense of obligation to the moment by making a documentary about the upcoming elections in which it appears the left have a long-awaited chance of success.

Moretti becomes increasingly distracted as his documentary progresses and the prospect of election looms. Anxieties over his impending fatherhood are compounded by his sense of disenchantment with the ineffectual Italian left. 

Aprile dispenses with the relatively tight three-chapter organisation of Caro Diario, taking a looser approach to the confessional, diaristic form. But, politics aside, certain key Moretti observations prevail, including his consistent disgust for sloppy journalism and, as a film exhibitor (he's been running his own art cinema, the Nouvo Sacher, in Rome for some years), a keen eye for the vagaries of cinematic fashion. 

As in Caro Diario, Moretti remains fascinated by the city itself, pootling around Rome on his trademark Vespa and revisiting his childhood haunts. He scores Aprile with an eclectic soundtrack that features Italian pop, Afro and Latin-American music, and a colourful number that closes the film in anticipation of getting his musical into production. 

Moretti was born in 1953. He describes himself as first and foremost a Roman. With his quizzical, aquiline features and neatly trimmed, owlish beard, he looks a little like an academic. (It's no surprise to learn that his father was a professor of the classics.) But he is above all a storyteller, somebody who can spot the humour and exoticism in what seem like even the most commonplace events.

"One day, I'll completely lose my mind and end up in London," he pronounces at one point. Moretti is a master of the disarming non-sequitur. As he grows more and more exasperated with the behaviour of the politicians, his mind begins to wander. Now a father, he wants to behave like a responsible adult. His friends tell him that it is his responsibility to teach his son the ropes. He fusses around, trying to make himself useful. Then he begins to ask himself why. "I have to give you support," he says to his partner as she prepares for the birth. "Who's going to give me support?" 
Chris Darke