Viva Zapatero!
Starring: Sabina Guzzanti, Rory Bremner, Michele Santoro
Director: Sabina Guzzanti
The film: This clever documentary examines the meltdown of civil liberties and ensuing dissent in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi's rule, which ended in May 2006 when he was defeated by Romano Prodi's centre-left alliance. Sabina Guzzanti's film has a title that alludes to Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish socialist prime minister whose first act in government was to relinquish his right to appoint executives overseeing the country's public television services. According to Guzzanti, it is that very power that Berlusconi exercised to the fullest in his attempts to curtail criticism against him and his allies in the Italian media.
Such blatant flouting of basic civil rights is epitomised by the way state-owned RAI's [Italian public television station] dropped Guzzanti's political satire show RAIot, after only one episode - a decision that came about after Berlusconi's Mediaset empire (which was lampooned in the show) attempted to sue the channel for Euro20 million. Viva Zapatero! was born out of RAI's decision not to reinstate the show even after the courts threw out Mediaset's case.
Some of the most entertaining moments lie with snippets of Guzzanti's impersonation of Berlusconi (the film opens with an exchange between her and Rory Bremner's Tony Blair, below), and Guzzanti's face-off with RAI executives about their decision not to show RAIot again. There's the dismayed channel president Lucia Annuzianta, (a journalist who was famous for putting so much heat on Berlusconi that he left in the middle of her TV interview and who later resigned from RAI) who dismissed Guzzanti's imitation of her; and then another executive who attempts to belittle the director by saying he knows her father, a senator for Berlusconi's Forza Italia party.