Part of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s mission is to foster greater understanding through world cinema. This year 72 Foreign Language films were submitted for Golden Globes consideration. Here is an overview of one of them.

A two-time Cannes winner (Best Director in 1994 with Caro Diario and Palme d’Or in 2006 with La Stanza del Figlio), with his latest film director Nanni Moretti has crafted an intimate, moving and funny story of a middle aged director Margherita (Margherita Buy) and her brother (Moretti) facing the death of their mother and the intimations of their own mortality. Moretti’s films are often semi-autobiographical narratives of angst and self-doubt and, for a time in his career, his characters were considered by Italian critics as a homegrown version of Woody Allen’s screen personas. In Mia Madre he has opted to cast frequent collaborator Margherita Buy in what is effectively a female alter-ego: a film director that is trying to finish a political film about a factory strike as her mother’s illness confronts her with feelings of grief and guilt.

The film also casts John Turturro as a loud, obstreperous and not particularly talented American actor hired as the lead in Margherita’s film- within-a-film.

A notoriously cinephile director, in this film Moretti references Truffaut’s Day For Night and Fellini’s 8½. A press conference in which Buy’s director is overcome by self-doubt while confronted with a firing line of reporters’ inane queries is an almost line-by-line homage to Fellini’s similar scene with Marcello Mastroianni. The overlay of film reality and dreams are also throwbacks to the Italian master’s oneiric style.

Luca Celada