20TH edition NOVEMBER 24 TO DECEMBER 2, 2023
20th edition
November 24 to December 2, 2023
Alice Rohrwacher was born in Fiesole, Italy, and studied in Turin and Lisbon. She wrote and played music for the theatre before being drawn to cinema, when she began working as a documentary film editor. In 2011, she directed her first feature film, Heavenly Body, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Festival de Cannes and screened at the London, New York, and Sundance Film Festivals, and the Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo International Film Festivals. Her second film, The Wonders (2014), won the Grand Prix at Cannes, while her third, Happy as Lazarus (2018), received the Best Screenplay award in Cannes. In 2023, Rohrwacher was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Live Action Short category for The Pupils, co-produced by Alfonso Cuarón for Disney.
Everyone has their own chimera, something they try to achieve but never succeed at. For the band of tombaroli — plunderers of ancient graves and archaeological wonders — the chimera means redemption from work and the dream of easy wealth. For Arthur, the chimera looks like the woman he lost, Beniamina. To find her, he challenges the invisible, searches everywhere, and goes into the earth — in search of the door to the afterlife spoken of in myths. In an adventurous journey between the living and the dead, between forests and cities, between celebrations and solitudes, the intertwined destinies of these characters unfold.