Mia madre

Margherita is directing a film about a factory occupation, political and heavy going. Everything goes wrong on set, and Barry Huggins, the star she brought from America, cannot get a single line right and tells life stories that are all invented. In the same weeks her mother is in hospital and will not recover. Margherita cannot stop working and stay there as her brother Giovanni has, and the effort to be in two places at once wears her out. The film is not interested in grief but in what comes before it: weeks spent knowing someone will die. Margherita keeps telling her actors the same thing, that she wants to see the person next to the character, and she can never manage it in her own life. Nanni Moretti directed and plays the brother Giovanni. Margherita Buy plays Margherita, John Turturro plays Barry and Giulia Lazzarini plays the mother. Moretti made the film after his own mother's death; she died during the shooting of his previous film Habemus Papam, and that experience is the direct source of the story. It played in competition at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. Who it is for: anyone who likes Italian cinema, Moretti, and films about filmmaking. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take the weight. The film does not shy from the hospital scenes, the dream passages interrupt the story, and Turturro's comic material does not always sit with the tone.