Alice Rohrwacher is widely regarded as a cinematic talent at the cutting edge of contemporary European art cinema. She is a Cannes favorite, where her first film Corpo Celeste won the Director’s Fortnight best film award in 2011. Her second film Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) won the Grand Prize of the Jury in 2014 and her latest film Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazarro) was a nominee for the Palme d’Or in 2018.

Lately I had the opportunity to see and discuss her first two films with two different groups of people and to see Happy as Lazarro in our local cinema. All three left me with many thoughts and were very much helped by further discussion and the taking in of the perceptions of others. 

Alice Rohrwacher was born in 1982 in Fiesole, Tuscany, an old town of etruscan origin, close to Florence. This is rather important to understand her feel for rural landscape and her sense of history and the impact of modernity on it. She was born to an Italian mother and a German father. Her father worked as a beekeeper. Her sister is the three years older actor Alba Rohrwacher, whom we know from prominent Italian films like Paolo Genovese’s Perfect Strangers, Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother is an Only Child and Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love.

Alice studied literature and philosophy at the university of Torino and entered filmmaking through documentary film. She says: documentary teaches you to look and learn. In an interview she tells about how she used to follow along her father in the car and fell asleep. When she woke up, she was fascinated by meeting and seeing a completely different context than the one she started with. She says: this is film. You close your eyes, and when you open them again you are in a completely other world with new opportunities and new reasons to see, feel and interpret. Her first two films start in the dark and when the light appears you find yourself transported into another world. 

Rohrwacher’s scripts are elastic. She delivers moving stories rich with spiritual and mythic tones. She describes her stories as a mushroom: it is allowed to grow to what it wants to be. It grows on her from the bottom up. In her films you meet the tensions coming from rural, traditional life being threatened and overthrown by modern life. She takes on some of the big changes that social development has confronted us with: the role of religion in Corpo Celeste, the role of the family in The Wonders and the losses and gains from social change in Happy as Lazarro. 

• Corpo Celeste (2011) plays in Reggio Calabria, a city in the south of Italy, just opposite of Sicily. It is about a single mother and her two daughters who return to stay with relatives after ten years living in Switzerland. Martha, the younger 13 year old, enters into a confirmation class to make new friends. As a disoriented outsider, she is confronted with the emptiness and irrelevance of the rites and teachings and her questions are not welcomed. It is a tender coming-of-age journey with an own exploration of spirituality. 
• Le Meraviglie (2014) has many autobiographical elements. It is the story of an ”alternative” family on a bee-farm dominated by a stubborn patriarch. The oldest daughter, the young teenager Gelsomina, more or less runs the family. Things start to happen when Gelsomina applies the family for a television competition about local products. A moving family portrait!
• Happy as Lazzaro (2018) is the next ambitious step in Rohrwacher’s film career. It is an imaginative story that starts in the spirit of Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs and of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, depicting rural, fuedal life in Italy in a neorealist manner and then turns into a dreamlike, time-unraveling fantasy, leaping into the troubled present of Italy with the question of innocence lost.

Rinus, Feb 2019

*Image posted for non commercial purposes
under 'fair use' of copyright material in recommendation of the films

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