Alice Rohrwacher: Last News

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentEmmy-winning “The Crown” star Josh O’Connor will be the protagonist of Italian auteur Alice Rohrwacher’s next film “La Chimera,” which is set in the world of archeological looting and is currently shooting in and around Southern Tuscany.O’Connor, who in “The Crown” played the young Prince Charles, in “La Chimera” is playing a young British archeologist named Arthur who gets involved in an international network of stolen Etruscan artifacts during the 1980s.Also starring in “La Chimera,” which can be loosely translated as “The Unrealizable Dream,” are Isabella Rossellini as a retired opera singer; Brazilian actor Carole Duarte (“The Invisible Life”) who plays another non-Italian woman who intersects with Arthur; Alba Rohrwacher as an international artifacts trafficker; and Vincenzo Nemolato (“Martin Eden”) who plays one of the “tombaroli,” literally grave robbers, as artifacts thieves are known in Italy. “‘La Chimera’ is the story of a young English archaeologist who gets involved in the underground world of the ‘tombaroli,’ the nocturnal raiders of Etruscan tombs,” the director said in a statement.Rohrwacher added that the film “is the final piece of a triptych on territory that I started with ‘The Wonders’ and which poses a central question: what to do with the past?” “Is the past merely a lost world, or does it intimately concern our present?,” Rohrwacher asks.“The Wonders,” which screened in Competition in 2014 at Cannes, winning the Grand Prix, was followed in 2018 by “Happy as Lazzaro” that also launched from the Croisette where it scooped the award for best screenplay.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentChiara Bellosi, whose first work, “Ordinary Justice,” launched from Berlin’s Generation 14plus section in 2020, is back with “Swing Ride” (“Calcinculo”) about an overweight 15-year-old named Benedetta pining for attention in an Italian province where she falls in love with the skinny non-binary Amanda.A key difference between the two films is that while “Ordinary Justice,” which examined the lives of two families on opposite sides of a murder case, originated from a deeply researched screenplay that Bellosi wrote, “Swing Ride” — premiering in Panorama on Feb. 13 — stems from a prizewinning script proposed to her by Carlo Cresto Dina, her producer, who also discovered Alice Rohrwacher (“Happy as Lazzaro”) and is known for nurturing the cream of Italy’s new cinematic crop.   “It’s a very different process; it was the first time that I had to start from a world that didn’t germinate from me,” said Bellosi about working from the script penned by Maria Teresa Venditti and Luca De Bei that won Italy’s prestigious Solinas prize in 2018.It was like moving into a new house that she had to make her own, she said.“I worked with the writers; I wanted to make a few tweaks and we did that together,” she added, noting that initially “it was a leap into the void.” But directing from their screenplay actually ended up giving her “more freedom” than her previous pic because “the container is already there; but you can go pretty wild with the rest.”This freedom also made it more fun.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentItaly’s Vision Distribution has boarded Berlin Panorama title “Swing Ride,” directed by Chiara Bellosi, and will launch sales at the upcoming EFM on the pic about an overweight teenager named Benedetta who is pining for attention.“Swing Ride” (“Calcinculo”) is set in a tiny southern Italian town where Benedetta meets Armando, aka Amanda, a young transvestite who runs the carousel and sells drugs.

Lise Pedersen Italian director Alice Rohrwacher presented her latest short film on Tuesday at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon, where she was guest of honor.The filmmaker was visibly moved as she took to the stage of the 100-year-old Comédie Odéon theater, where the 9-minute short she made with French artist JR, “Omelia Contadina” (“A Peasant Homily”), was screened.“It’s not really a film, it’s not art either – you could call it a cinematic action,” she explained about the short, which features two of JR’s signature giant cardboard cut-out figures being carried to their graves by a group of farmers as part of a kind of funeral rite, symbolizing the burial of traditional farming.

In venturing out of the Luzzatti quarter of Naples where most of the first season of “My Brilliant Friend” is set, the second season, subtitled “The Story of a New Name,” breaks new ground in several ways that are key to understanding the show’s overall vision and ambitious aesthetic scope.