Italian movie director and actor Nanni Moretti will head the Cannes Film Festival jury. The world’s most celebrated Festival at the French Riviera will run from May 16 to 27. When Cannes’ Delegate-General Thierry Fremaux said “high-spirited and marked by his modernity and intelligence, Nanni Moretti's movies are the incarnation of all the best in cinema over the past 30 years", the eulogy    seemed absolutely befitting.

Festival chief Gilles Jacob had a premonition that Moretti would become a legend when he chose his Ecce Bombo in 1978. That has come true.

Six of Moretti’s films have played at Cannes with his 2001 The Son’s Room winning the coveted Palm d’Or and his 1994 Dear Diary clinching the director’s trophy. Last year, his sharply satirical Habemus Papam (We Have A Pope) competed at Cannes.

Moretti was born in 1953 in Brunico, Italy. After several short films, he signed his first feature, Io Sono un Autarchico (I Am Self Sufficient), in 1976, and went on to create a cinema that was subtly critical of contemporary society, a cinema that endeared to critics and picked prizes by their dozens in several major festivals. Also an actor par excellence, playing lead roles in many of his own movies, Moretti has always had this remarkable ability to surprise us.