Often starring in his own movies, Nanni Moretti once again plays a fictional version of himself - a film director struggling to shoot his passion project.
Giovanni, a renowned Italian filmmaker, is getting ready to start shooting his new movie, a feature film set in 1956, about a Hungarian travelling circus invited to Rome by a local office of the Italian Communist Party. The project is compromised since the very outset, as Giovanni is facing a series of critical issues. The project does not seem to arouse much enthusiasm among his crew, his producer is on the verge of bankruptcy and his wife decides to leave him after forty years of marriage. Always a tightrope walker, Giovanni will have to rethink his way of doing things if he wants to lead his little world towards a radiant future.
"Giovanni is shooting a film whose action takes place in 1956, at the time of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He firmly believes in the project: he is convinced that it is necessary to tell the story of the Italian Communist Party of the time and the way in which it missed the opportunity to break away from the Soviet Union, to finally take an independent path. But today no one remembers these events, the world has changed and the way of making films too. While Giovanni is convinced to make a political film, his actress thinks the contrary: according to her, Giovanni is shooting a love film and doesn't realize it. And she might be right." (Nanni Moretti)