Nanni Moretti Returns to the Lido With the Untold Story of Palombella Rossa

Thirty-seven years after Palombella Rossa reached Venice by an unusual route, Nanni Moretti is returning to the Lido with Succederà questa notte. The story of how his 1989 film arrived at the festival is being retold by film critic and festival curator Mario Sesti.

The film had been rejected for the main competition. At the time, Moretti had already won the Silver Lion in Venice in 1981 for Sogni d’oro and the Silver Bear in Berlin in 1986 for La messa è finita, but he had not yet become the Italian director whose films would regularly appear alongside those of the world’s leading filmmakers.

Sesti recalls a late-night telephone conversation with Moretti in June 1989. “Biraghi told me that he wouldn’t take my film to Venice,” Moretti said, according to Sesti’s account. Moretti then suggested showing the film to the National Union of Film Critics, which ran the festival’s Critics’ Week. Although the section normally selected only first and second films, Moretti proposed treating Palombella Rossa as a special event.

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Biraghi told me that he wouldn’t take my film to Venice.

Sesti, then a member of the union’s board, took the idea to its president, Lino Miccichè. Moretti organized a preview attended by Critics’ Week representative Enrico Magrelli, along with Giovanni Buttafava, Emanuela Martini and Roberto Ellero. The film subsequently entered Venice as a special Critics’ Week program.

That screening brought Palombella Rossa to the attention of Serge Daney, then a leading French critic at Libération. Daney described the hero Michele Apicella with the phrase “Floating is still work,” linking the struggle to stay afloat in water and language with resistance to advertising aesthetics and the commercialization of images. Sesti concludes that this was, in some ways, where France’s deep affection for Moretti’s cinema began.

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Floating is still work.