Nanni Moretti, the filmmaker who made a cinema out of himself — and then walked out of the frame

Nanni Moretti

Photo: Georges Biard / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 19, 1953 Bruneck, Italy
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Caro diario, Bianca, The Son's Room
Awards	Palme d'Or · Best Director, Cannes Film Festival · Silver Bear · Special Jury Prize, Venice Film Festival · David di Donatello

There is a scene in Il sol dell’avvenire where Nanni Moretti, riding an electric scooter through Rome at night, choreographs a crowd of Hungarian communists into a dance. It is ridiculous and precise and completely characteristic: a filmmaker who understands that his best comedies work because they are shot through with a particular kind of dread. What he has always been trying to figure out — across five decades of films in which he placed himself, reluctantly, at the center — is whether sincerity can survive cinema’s appetite for performance.

Moretti was born in Bruneck, South Tyrol, in the summer of 1953, the son of a Latin teacher and a philosophy professor. Cinema was something he came to sideways. As a teenager in Rome, he sold his stamp collection to buy a Super 8 camera, then spent the next few years making short films with friends in Roman apartments. His first feature, Io sono un autarchico, shot in 1976 for almost nothing, circulated on the Super 8 circuit before anyone thought to call it art. It was not polished, but it was direct: a young man trying to figure out how to live honestly in a world built on accommodation.

What followed was one of Italian cinema’s more unusual double lives. Through the late 1970s and 1980s, Moretti produced a string of films — Ecce bombo, Bianca, La messa è finita — all of them starring a character called Michele Apicella: neurotic, argumentative, committed to positions that made social life nearly impossible. La messa è finita won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale in 1986. Palombella rossa put Apicella on a water polo pitch and surrounded him with political bewilderment. What distinguished these films from Italian comedies of the era was an unusual willingness to implicate the director’s own rigidities in the joke. The comedy was specific enough that it read, to Italian audiences, as documentary.

Caro diario, in 1993, shifted registers. Three episodes — Moretti on a Vespa through Rome, visiting the site of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death; Moretti island-hopping; Moretti navigating the Italian medical system after a lymphoma diagnosis — made a mosaic that didn’t feel like a film at all. It was something closer to a letter: confessional, funny, angry in an oddly sociable way. Cannes gave him Best Director in 1994. A more precise description of what happened is that European cinema recognized something it had not quite seen before.

La stanza del figlio, in 2001, is still the pivot. Moretti played a psychoanalyst whose teenage son dies in a diving accident, and the film took the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The remarkable thing about it is that Michele Apicella is nowhere in it. For the first time, Moretti was playing a character, not a persona — and the grief the film describes is formal, architectural, built from silences more than speeches. Those who had found his earlier work too solipsistic came to the film; those who had loved the solipsism were not quite sure what to make of this restraint.

The subsequent decade produced two films that clarified the limits of his approach. Il caimano, in 2006, was a direct satire of Silvio Berlusconi — or rather, a film about the impossibility of making a satire of Berlusconi, which is a more interesting subject. Habemus Papam, in 2011, cast Michel Piccoli as a pope who cannot face the job, with Moretti as the psychoanalyst brought in to help. Both films were admired for their intelligence and gently criticized for their safety. The charge — that his political films hedge at the exact moment when commitment would cost something — has followed him long enough to be worth taking seriously. His defenders argue the hedging is the point, that honest ambivalence is rarer than conviction. His critics find the equivocation comfortable in ways his early work was not.

After Mia Madre, in 2015 — a film about a director making a film while her mother dies, the most autobiographical of his later works without quite saying so — and Tre piani in 2021, Il sol dell’avvenire returned to meta-film territory. A director makes a period film about Hungarian communists in Rome in 1956, while his marriage collapses and his industry changes around him. It was a film about failure and attachment that happened to be very funny in places. In April 2025, Moretti suffered a heart attack in Rome. He recovered. Production on Succederà questa notte had already begun; post-production continued while he recuperated.

Succederà questa notte — It Will Happen Tonight in English — premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 5, 2026. It is a love story, loosely based on Eshkol Nevo’s short story collection Hungry Heart, and it stars Louis Garrel and Jasmine Trinca. For the first time in his career, Moretti is not in it. Whether the cinema he built for five decades — one that worked because it insisted on a particular presence at its center — survives that absence is the question his new film asks. With another project, Primo viaggio, already in development, it appears the departure from the frame may be permanent.