Continuing in the same vein as Dear Diary, Aprile is an even more personal and explicitly political film. This chronicle begins in 1994, just as Berlusconi’s right-wing party assumes power. Moretti is despondent but feels obliged to make a documentary that will depict the Italian Right as dangerous and the Left as complacent. The filmmaker has others things going on in his life that continuously interrupt his project. The most important of these is the birth of his son, and some of the film’s most memorable moments show Moretti’s amusing battles with the demands of fatherhood. Another distraction is a wonderfully daft alternative movie running inside the director’s headoa colourful 1950s musical about a Trotskyist chef, images from which appear as Moretti struggles with his documentary. These conflicting impulses are both Moretti’s own and those of Italian society as a whole. Indecision and contradiction are key themes in Aprile, which Moretti pieced together over a three-year period. Appropriately for a film that combines elements of fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, Aprile is at once eccentric and sharp, rambling and to the point. It is also very funny.
Italy-France, 1998. English subtitles. Colour. Dolby digital stereo. 78 mins.

Plus
The Opening Day of ‘Close-Up’/Il Giorno della prima di ‘Close-Up’, a humorous short about the opening of Abbas Kiarostami’s masterpiece at Moretti’s Sacher cinema in Rome.
Italy, 1996. English subtitles. Colour. 7 mins.