Nanni Moretti is perhaps the most influential of all of Italy's contemporary filmmakers and has achieved, since the release of Caro Diario/Dear Diary (1994), an international reputation. Moretti has played a significant role in the Italian cinema industry since the release of his first film Io sono un autarchico/I am Self-Sufficient in 1977, emerging ‘as a somewhat unwilling spokesman for his decidedly disaffected generation’ (Porton and Ellickson 1995: 11). An inheritor of the film-making tradition of neorealism (Rascaroli 2003), Moretti is a total filmmaker who has worked (and continues to work) as an actor, producer, writer and director; in addition to which he runs his own production and distribution companies. Moretti's creative independence empowers his cinema, enabling him to use film to communicate to a broad public. Moretti's status has also meant that he has become a satirical independent political ‘agitator’, incensed by the corruption of the Italian right and dejected by the lassitude of the left. Moretti's films are engaged with a political and aesthetic critique of contemporary media (both in an Italian context and an international context), taking film and television as their object alongside party politics in an interestingly complex and self-reflexive fashion.The phrase, ‘say something left-wing’ originates from a scene in Moretti's 1998 film Aprile in which an incredulous Moretti watches Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi denounce the Italian magistracy on a popular current affairs television programme. Massimo D'Alema, the leader of the PDS (Partito Democratico della Sinistra), has no response to Berlusconi, which provokes the enraged Moretti to shout at the television screen: ‘D'Alema, react, say something, react, say something, answer, say something left-wing, say something even not left-wing, something civlised!’. The phrase not only came to define D'Alema but it has also passed into popular political discourse (Mazierska and Rascaroli 2004: 144).This article will explore Moretti's significance as a public film-maker who is prepared to repeatedly ‘say something left wing’. Concentrating on Il Caimano (2006), and on Moretti's more recent films (although reference will be made to his formative features), the article will consider Moretti's films as both media texts/objects in the public sphere, and also as texts that take the media and the public sphere as their object of representation and analysis.