Italian director Nanni Moretti in intensive care after heart attack

The Guardian

03-04-2025

Italian film director Nanni Moretti is in intensive care at a Rome hospital after suffering a heart attack, according to local media reports.
The 71-year-old director, actor and screenwriter – best known outside Italy for 1993's Caro Diario (Dear Diary) and 2001's The Son's Room – was taken to hospital on Wednesday afternoon. He underwent surgery and is in intensive care, with Italian news agency Ansa reporting that he is in a stable condition.
Often compared to Woody Allen for his quirky, offbeat and autobiographical films, in which he often appears as his alter ego, the quiet, media-shy Moretti is one of Italian cinema's sharpest social commentators. His film repertoire has included biting satire as well as gently handled stories of family crisis, such as The Son's Room, about the effect of a son's sudden death on a family, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2001.
Often mixing awkward humour with political critique, Moretti's incisive films have taken on such topics as former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in the 2006 satire The Caiman and the inner workings of the Holy See in 2011's We Have a Pope.
After a string of films, beginning with his 1976 comedy I Am Self-Sufficient, shot on Super 8, Moretti found fame outside Italy with Caro Diario, when he zoomed into the international public's consciousness on his Vespa scooter. The film, in which Moretti zigzags through a nearly deserted Rome while sharing offbeat interactions with those he meets along the way, won him a best director award at Cannes in 1994.
Moretti's most recent film, A Brighter Tomorrow, in which he plays a film director competed in the Cannes film festival in 2023.