Daniele Luchetti, the director Italy filed under political satire

Daniele Luchetti

Photo: Bart ryker / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1960 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Film director
Known for	My Brother Is an Only Child, The Ties, Ordinary Happiness
Awards	5 David di Donatello · Nastro d'Argento · Premio Flaiano

Ask an Italian of a certain age about Daniele Luchetti and the answer comes quickly: Il portaborse, the comedy with Silvio Orlando as a speechwriter and Nanni Moretti as the minister who swallows him whole, the film that seemed to see the bribery scandal coming before the magistrates did. That label has followed the Roman director for more than three decades. It is also, by now, mostly wrong. Luchetti’s real subject has never been parliament. It is the family — two brothers who pick opposite flags, a husband who walks out and then walks back in — and, more and more, the family as someone else first wrote it down.

He grew up in Rome, the son of a writer, and has credited his classical high school with teaching him how a story changes depending on who tells it, which is a screenwriter’s lesson learned before he knew he would need it. After studying literature and art history he enrolled at the Gaumont film school founded by Renzo Rossellini, where his first short ended up inside a collective student feature, Juke box. The school also put him in a room with Moretti. Luchetti became his assistant director on Bianca and La messa è finita and watched at close range how a filmmaker could turn private irritation into a portrait of a country.

Moretti’s company, Sacher Film, produced his first feature, Domani accadrà, in 1988. Luchetti, born in Rome in 1960, was still in his twenties; the film won him the David di Donatello for best new director and a special mention for the Caméra d’Or at Cannes. The film that made his name came three years later.

Il portaborse premiered in competition at Cannes in 1991. Orlando plays a high-school teacher hired to ghost-write for an ambitious young minister, played by Moretti with a cold, amused appetite. The story was invented, yet before it even reached cinemas several politicians told the press they felt targeted, which did more for the box office than any campaign. A year later the Mani pulite investigations began dismantling Italy’s governing parties, and the film was recast as prophecy. It took four Davids, including best screenplay for Luchetti.

The partnership that would shape the rest of his career started on stage. In 1992 Luchetti directed Sottobanco, built from the classroom stories of Domenico Starnone, a novelist who had spent years teaching in Italian high schools. The play toured Italy with Orlando and turned, in 1995, into the film La scuola, which won the David for best film. Starnone’s books would bring Luchetti back twice more.

The next peak came through another writer. Mio fratello è figlio unico, adapted from Antonio Pennacchi’s novel Il fasciocomunista with screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, followed two brothers in Latina from the 1960s into the 1970s — Elio Germano as the one who drifts towards the fascist right, Riccardo Scamarcio as the communist. It screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2007, won the David and the Nastro d’Argento for its screenplay, and earned Germano the David for best actor. Three years later La nostra vita, with Germano as a construction worker suddenly left alone with his sons, was the only Italian film in competition at Cannes; Germano shared the best actor prize with Javier Bardem, and Luchetti won the David for best director in 2011.

The pattern is worth naming, because it complicates the official story. Luchetti’s actors tend to walk away with the trophies, and his finest work leans on someone else’s book: Pennacchi, Starnone three times, Elena Ferrante, Giorgio Fontana, now Maria Grazia Calandrone. In a film culture that still measures directors by how personal their scripts are, that has made him easy to file one shelf below Moretti or Paolo Sorrentino. The exceptions cut both ways. Anni felici, a largely autobiographical film about an artist’s family in the summer of 1974, is among his most personal, while Chiamatemi Francesco, a 2015 biopic of Jorge Mario Bergoglio that also aired as a television miniseries, sits outside his usual territory and rarely comes up when critics sum him up. What survives across both is a precise ear for how couples and siblings wound each other in ordinary sentences.

That ear brought him the most visible job of his later career. Lacci, his second Starnone adaptation, with Alba Rohrwacher and Luigi Lo Cascio as a marriage broken by an affair and stitched back together, opened the Venice Film Festival out of competition in September 2020 — the first Italian film to open the festival since Giuseppe Tornatore’s Baarìa in 2009. In 2022 he took over the third season of My Brilliant Friend, the HBO and Rai adaptation of Ferrante’s novels, and won the Premio Flaiano for television direction. He also made two documentaries about Italian performers, Raffa on Raffaella Carrà and Codice Carla on the ballerina Carla Fracci, before returning to Starnone with Confidenza, a study of a teacher held hostage by a secret, starring Germano and scored by Thom Yorke, which had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in early 2024.

Prima di noi, co-directed with Valia Santella from Fontana’s novel, follows the Sartori family from the retreat at Caporetto in 1917 to 1978; it previewed at the Rome Film Fest in October 2025 and aired on Rai 1 from 4 January 2026. Then, on 18 October 2026, the Rome festival’s Grand Public section premiered Noi, un po’ meglio, a romantic comedy produced by Lucky Red for Netflix and released only on the platform from 29 October. Germano, in his fourth lead for Luchetti, and Maria Chiara Giannetta play a settled family man and a woman who never wanted children, whose attempt to adopt drags every old disagreement into the open. For the director whose 1991 film became a national event in cinemas, skipping theatres entirely says a good deal about where mid-budget Italian comedy now lives.

His next film is in production and points back to Rome. Dove non mi hai portata adapts Calandrone’s memoir-novel, a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2023, about a baby found alone in the Villa Borghese gardens in 1965 and the daughter who, decades later, reconstructs the mother who left her there. The cast includes Tecla Insolia and Margherita Buy, and the Italian film press points to a cinema release through 01 Distribution in 2027. It is another family, another book, another chance for the man once filed under political satire to show what he has been filming all along.