Abstract: Through the case study of Cannes award-winner, The Son's Room (Nanni Moretti, 2001), this chapter interrogates film festivals’ selfpresentation as institutions that “take nothing into account other than the art of film” (Gilles Jacob cited in Elsaesser, 2005, p. 98). I argue that European A festivals mobilise the auteur as a figure of artistic universality and anti-commercial purity—a means of disavowing their statuses as enterprises engaged in a struggle for the very definition of art. I use Nanni Moretti's ambivalent authorial persona in The Son's Room to “speak back” to such disavowal, showing how Moertti's self-conscious performance of auteurism highlights the contradictions of the auteur as at once a symbol of artistic freedom and product of commercial constraint.

Keywords: auteur theory, art cinema, Nanni Moretti, film festivals, Italian cinema, film authorship

A close family in a small northern Italian city. The father, Giovanni, the mother, Paola and their two teenage children: Irene the elder and Andrea, the younger. Giovanni is a psychoanalyst. In his consulting-room next to his flat, his patients confide their neurosis to him, which contrasts strongly with his own quiet existence.

One Sunday morning, Giovanni is called by a patient for an emergency. He is not able to go jogging with his son, like he had told him. Andrea leaves to go scuba diving with friends and he never comes back from it…