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Annem (film, 2015)

My Mother (Mia madre)

Movie · 2015 · 15 people

In 2015 Nanni Moretti directed the Italian-French drama Annem (Italian original Mia madre, English My Mother). Moretti wrote the script with Francesco Piccolo. The film of about 106 minutes had its world premiere at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or and won the Ecumenical Jury Prize. It also screened in Toronto's Special Presentations section that year.

At the center is Margherita (Margherita Buy), a director working day and night on a factory-workers drama she sees as the most important work of her career. A perfectionist on set, she also faces trouble at home: her mother is seriously ill and her teenage daughter lashes out unexpectedly. The behavior of Barry Huggins (John Turturro), the American actor who joins the shoot, pushes the production further into a corner. It portrays mothers and daughters across three generations, with semi-autobiographical traces from Moretti's life. Besides Margherita Buy and John Turturro, the cast includes Giulia Lazzarini, Renato Scarpa and Moretti himself.

It opened in Italy on April 16, 2015 and in Turkey on November 20, 2015. It took roughly 40 thousand lira in Turkish cinemas and $7.7 million worldwide. One Turkish critic gave it 4.0, calling it very good.

DirectorNanni Moretti

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Cast

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Margherita Buy Margherita Buy Actor · 64 years old Renato Scarpa Renato Scarpa Actor · died at 82 John Turturro Nanni Moretti Beatrice Mancini Giulia Lazzarini Stefano Abbati Anna Bellato Lorenzo Gioielli Pietro Ragusa Tatiana Lepore Davide Iacopini Camilla Semino Favro Domenico Diele Francesco Brandi

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Through different eyes

Cinephile Looks at script, editing and directing choices; keeps a distance from formula films.

Moretti's smartest choice is to use the film-within-a-film structure not as a game but as a mirror of his heroine's inner life. Margherita, who tries to control every detail on set, is set against the helplessness that her mother's illness brings, and the editing moves between these two worlds to build a tension between an obsession with control and a fear of loss that cannot be controlled. The trouble Barry Huggins brings to the shoot adds one more outside pressure. Still, in my view the two strands do not carry equal weight: the chaos-on-set scenes never reach the density of the delicate drama around mother and daughter, and the shifts between the two tones are not always smooth. The film is at its strongest when the camera turns back to the home.

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

What makes the film socially interesting is the quiet question of whose shoulders the burden of care falls on. A woman director making the most important work of her career is at the same time responsible for her sick mother and her teenage daughter, and the bond between three generations of women shows, without exaggeration, how a working woman is split between two worlds. That the film Margherita is shooting is a story about factory workers adds another layer: the effort to portray a labour struggle is set against the invisible labour in her own life, which is care. The film never spells out this comparison, but placing the two side by side says a great deal.

Family Viewer Asks whether the whole household can watch it; cares about humour and heart.

The subject is heavy: a seriously ill mother and a family trying to carry that weight. It is not for small children; both the subject and the drama-driven storytelling will lose them. For adults and older teenagers, though, it can start a conversation about mothers and daughters. Grandmother, mother and daughter watching it together could mean something. But if your family has recently been through a similar illness, think it over first.

These are not reader reviews: they are short editorial takes written from different viewer perspectives with AI assistance. Reader reviews are below.

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