With the awarding of the Palme d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival to Nanni Moretti’s new film, The Son’s Room, a wider international community has begun to learn what many have long known: that Moretti is a bellwether of contemporary Italian cinema. From the early 1970s, when his first Super-8 shorts were a hit with Roman cinema clubs, to this most recent success, the forty-seven-year-old Moretti has written, directed, and starred in each of his films—most often as Michele Apicella, a resilient alter ego in the tradition of Chaplin’s Little Tramp. An intellectual even amidst low-brow slapstick, Moretti, best known in this country for his celebrated Dear Diary, practices the art of balancing comedy with deeper metaphysical concerns and a political consciousness informed by his close involvement in the Italian Communist Party. This retrospective provides a long-overdue opportunity to discover the work of this idiosyncratic auteur, an artist whose charming restlessness and quest for ideological solutions has made him one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation in Europe.