Breakfast at the Movies with Nanni Moretti (The Mass Is Over)

Appointment, Sunday, February 18th, with Cinema a Colazione Season 2, a film festival organized by Centro Studi Commedia all’italiana, 50+ University of Livorno, FiPiLi Horror Festival, Circolo Kinoglaz, and Erasmo Libri, with the participation of the Municipality of Livorno.

At Cinema Salesiani, Viale del Risorgimento, 85, on Sunday morning (9.15 breakfast – 10.30 film screening), the restored classic film LA MESSA È FINITA by Nanni Moretti (Italy 1985 – 1h34m) will be shown. The film will be introduced by film critic Roberto Lasagna.

Ticket : 8 euros, including breakfast.

La messa è finita (Italy, 1985). Directed by Nanni Moretti. Starring: Nanni Moretti, Marco Messeri, Margarita Lozano, Ferruccio De Ceresa, Enrica Maria Modugno, Eugenio Masciari, Luisa De Santis, Pietro De Vico, Roberto Vezzosi, Vincenzo Salemme, Dario Cantarelli. In 1986, it won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival, the grand jury prize for Nanni Moretti.

After being a parish priest on an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, young Don Giulio is transferred to Rome and assigned to a church in the suburbs. His new task proves to be very difficult, if not daunting. The parish he has been assigned to has been practically deserted by the faithful after his predecessor got married, and his old friends have changed a lot: Andrea is on trial for terrorism, Cesare wants to change religions, become Catholic, and seems determined to become a priest, another has discovered he is homosexual and spends his evenings in squalid adventures, and yet another has been abandoned by his partner and lives in a manic seclusion. As if that weren’t enough, even the family environment is not peaceful: his father suddenly leaves his wife because he’s in love with another woman; his sister is pregnant with her boyfriend Simone and it’s hard to convince her not to have an abortion; the mother – desperate – takes her own life. Involved in such serious and diverse personal situations, discouraged and not always able to provide help or, at the very least, the answers he is asked for, little by little Don Giulio feels the weight of his loneliness and his powerlessness in the face of a series of problems. In an environment and a city that seem distant and almost hostile to him, Don Giulio makes a choice: he will leave for South America, to the Land of Magellan.

Nanni Moretti was born on August 19, 1953, in Brunico (Italy). In 2011, he received the award for Best Director at the Nastri d’Argento for the film Habemus Papam. From 1978 to 2011, Nanni Moretti won 12 awards, including the David di Donatello (1991, 2006), Berlin Film Festival (1986), Cannes Film Festival (1994), and Nastri d’Argento (1978, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996, 2001, 2011).

Roberto Lasagna – Essayist, psychologist, and film critic, he has published numerous books and contributed to the study of Stanley Kubrick’s work with three essays: I film di Stanley Kubrick (1997); Il mondo di Kubrick (2001); Cinema, estetica, filosofia (2015); Odissea nello spazio di Stanley Kubrick (2018). He has degrees in psychology, philosophy, and economics, and has written a history of Disney cinema, published in 2001 and 2011, and an essay on the relationship between cinema and work psychology Da Chaplin a Loach, as well as books on Nanni Moretti, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Wim Wenders, and other actors and directors. Since 2019, he has shared the artistic direction of the Adelio Ferrero – Cinema and Critique Festival with Giorgio Simonelli.