Name: It Will Happen Tonight
Director: Nanni Moretti

Nanni Moretti has world-premiered It Will Happen Tonight (Succederà questa notte) in the main competition of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, and the surprise is not the film but the address. For most of his career the Lido has been the one major festival Moretti did not go to — and now, competing for the Golden Lion, he is back on a red carpet he walked away from a very long time ago.

To understand why that matters you have to know the grudge underneath it. Moretti is a Cannes director in the way few filmmakers belong anywhere: nine of his features have played in competition on the Croisette, and one of them, The Son’s Room, took the Palme d’Or. Venice, by contrast, saw him last with Palombella rossa in 1989, and only in a sidebar. Festival lore has long held that the Lido’s coolness toward that political comedy is exactly what pushed him to Cannes and kept him there for the better part of four decades. Returning to compete here is, in that reading, a small act of reconciliation.

The reason is less romantic than the symbolism. Moretti suffered a heart attack in the spring of last year, and the recovery slowed post-production enough that the film missed the window his Cannes premieres have always occupied. Venice became the festival that fit the calendar — a scheduling accident that happens to close a loop no one expected him to close.

The film itself returns to a writer he has mined before. It Will Happen Tonight is adapted from Hungry Heart, a short-story collection by the Israeli author Eshkol Nevo, whose interlocking-lives structure Moretti already used for Three Floors in 2021. This time the material is a love story of mistimings: two people, Matteo and Greta, who keep finding each other at the wrong moment and keep believing, against the evidence, that life holds one more chance in reserve. It is Moretti in a softer register than the essayistic, self-interrogating mode that made his name — the diary-film ironist trying on straight romance.

He has cast the part of the mistimed lovers across borders. Louis Garrel plays Matteo and Jasmine Trinca — who was the teenage daughter in The Son’s Room a quarter-century ago — plays Greta, with Angela Finocchiaro, Elena Lietti, Andrea Lattanzi, Antonio De Matteo and the French veteran Hippolyte Girardot around them. Moretti, as usual, steps in front of his own camera in a supporting role. Shot largely in Italian across an Italy–France–Spain production and running 103 minutes, it is a compact film by festival standards, which for Moretti tends to mean a concentrated one.

What a first competition screening cannot settle is whether the register suits him. Moretti’s best films run on the friction between a man and his own certainties; a pure love story removes that friction, and the risk is a picture that is charming where his work is usually restless. That is the honest question the Sala Grande brings to it, and it is not one a synopsis can answer in advance.

It Will Happen Tonight competes for the Golden Lion, awarded on 12 September by the jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal. 01 Distribution opens the film in Italian cinemas on 3 December, with BTeam Pictures releasing it in Spain later in the month; a wider international rollout follows the festival.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, Louis Garrel, Nanni Moretti, It Will Happen Tonight, Jasmine Trinca