Nanni Moretti: Italian director suffers heart attack

Wedding news from the Italian film world: The renowned director Nanni Moretti (71) suffered a heart attack on Wednesday afternoon and was admitted to the San Camillo hospital in Rome. There he had to be operated on immediately ,.

After the life -saving procedure, the multi -award -winning filmmaker was moved to the cardiological intensive care unit. His condition is described as serious but stable, the forecast remains uncertain for the time being.

Actually, Moretti should have participated in the premiere of the film “L’Antachement” by director Carine Tardieu with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi on Wednesday evening. His appearance at the event was canceled at short notice because the director “didn’t go well”.

During the opening event of the French film festival “Rendez-Vous” in the Nuovo Sacher, Moretti’s own cinema in Rome, the director Alice Rohrwacher sent warm recovery wishes: “I would like to express the thought of all of us to Nanni Moretti,” she said during the award ceremony.

Nothing had indicated health problems. On Monday, Moretti introduced the film “Gioventù Romantica” by the Chinese director Jia Zhangke in his cinema Nuovo Sacher in Trastevere and talked to the Italian director Paola Cortellesi.

It is not the first time that the health state of the filmmaker gives rise to concern. In October 2023 Moretti had already suffered a first heart attack. : “I’m sorry not to be with you, but I’m not doing well. I will be better off soon, I’ll be back soon.”

In addition, the director successfully fought against Hodgkin lymphoma between 1990 and 1991. At the Rome Film Festival in 2017, he spoke about a second tumor who had hit him “twenty years later, in another place” and which he was able to defeat through radiation therapy.

Nanni Moretti is one of the most important filmmakers in Italy. With “Golden Dreams” (1981) Moretti won the Golden Löwen in Venice, “The Mass is out” (1985) brought him a silver bear in Berlin. In 1994 he was honored as the best director for “Caro Diario” (“dear diary”) in Cannes. For his film “La Stanza del Figlio” (“My son’s room”), he was awarded the Golden Palm in Cannes in 2001.

His most recent work “Il Sol dell’avvenire” (“The Sun of the Future”) appeared in 2023 and tells the story of a director, played by Moretti himself, who works on a film that does not want to progress, as well as that of a party official of the communist party in the 1950s. The film reflects on typical Moretti’s kind – between irony and melancholy – the decline of former certainties.

Friends, colleagues and fans are now hoping for a soon recovery of the estimated filmmaker.