Rome. Today. 72 years since his death, Benito Mussolini inexplicably reappears in Piazza Vittorio. The war is over and everything seems changed. Yet il Duce is not one to shirk a challenge, and given what he sees around him, the time seems ripe for the plucking. With an opportunistic documentarian in tow – his own Boswell, or Sancho Panza, Mussollini sets out to retake Italy…

Luca Miniero’s comedy is an astute and troubling satire on the reemergence of fascism powered by a ferociously charismatic performance from Massimo Popolizio (The Great Beauty; Il Divo). Miniero depicts the crass commercial realities of today’s popular culture (a reality framed by Berlusconi’s television stations of course) as the perfect conduit for Duce-esque rants about migrants and unemployment, and imagines a populace ready to tune out its moral qualms in favour of a quick and dirty political fix.