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19 August 2017: Dear Diary

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Marking the Italian auteur’s birthday – and echoing our On the Road season – we’re pleased to present Nanni Morreti’s wry, affectionate and very funny odyssey through the Roman suburbs, the Aeolian Isles, and the Italian health system. Travelling around a deserted Rome in mid-August, Morretti presents a testimony and love letter to cinema, Italy and life.

Dear Diary
Nanni Moretti
1993 | 100 min | Colour | 35mm

“Moretti earned Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival for this unusual and deceptively simple melange of humorous and sober musings told in three vignettes. Relaxed and leisurely, Dear Diary is an effortless blend of documentary and fiction: part road movie, part sociological satire, part polemical reminiscence. In the first segment, wanderings and coincidences reveal Moretti’s views on cinema as he naively takes in a screening of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The second episode, set in Sicily, riotously reflects on the lapse of the politics of the 1960s into marginality. In the final segment, Moretti touchingly turns the camera on his own struggle with cancer.” – Harvard Film Archive