Mia madre (lit. '"My Mother"') is a 2015 internationally co-produced drama film directed by Nanni Moretti. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.[2][3] It was screened in the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.[4]
Margherita (Margherita Buy) is a director working on a social-realist film about a factory strike called Noi siamo qui (We Are Here), starring American actor Barry Huggins (John Turturro) as the factory owner. Huggins consistently fails to deliver his lines properly and the fraught nature of the shoot is exacerbated by unhelpful advice from Margherita to her actors. She breaks up with her boyfriend, an actor in the film, and is divorced from the father of her daughter, Livia (Beatrice Mancini). Her brother Giovanni (Nanni Moretti) has taken time off work to help care for their ailing mother, Ada (Giulia Lazzarini), a retired classics teacher who has been hospitalised. Margherita comes to feel guilty for not taking on more responsibility for her mother and reflects on her often cold relations with her family, friends and colleagues.
Mia Madre has an approval rating of 84% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 92 reviews, and an average rating of 7.3/10. The website's critical consensus states: "Mia Madre explores thought-provoking themes with director/co-writer Nanni Moretti's reliably skillful blend of comedy and pathos".[5] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "generaly favorable reviews".[6]
Les Cahiers du cinéma placed the film 1st in their 2015 Top Ten chart[7] and featured Nanni Moretti on their November's cover.[8] High on Films Website wrote "Life, death, film-making, solitude, relationships & existential crisis form the crux of Nanni Moretti's Mia Madre".[9]