TSPDT

Key Production Countries: Italy, France, Switzerland
Key Genres: Drama, Rural Drama, Comedy, Fantasy, Comedy Drama, Coming-of-Age
Key Collaborators: Carlo Cresto-Dina (Producer), Hélène Louvart (Cinematographer), Alba Rohrwacher (Leading Actress), Emita Frigato (Production Designer), Tiziana Soudani (Producer), Agnese Graziani (Character Actress), Paolo Del Brocco (Producer), Michael Weber (Producer), Nelly Quettier (Editor), Marco Spoletini (Editor), Maria Alexandra Lungu (Character Actor), Luca Chikovani (Character Actor)

"Rohrwacher is at once one of the most singular and most successful directors making films in Italy today. Her ties to the Italian film world are evident in her choice of collaborators, who include the director Pietro Marcello, with whom she codirected the documentary Futura (2021), and the A-list actresses Monica Bellucci and Isabella Rossellini, as well as the director’s older sister, Alba Rohrwacher… The ambit of Rohrwacher’s work is broad and her vision is all-encompassing, conveyed exquisitely in cinematography by Hélène Louvart, with whom she has partnered since Corpo celeste (2011), her first film." - Emma Wilson (Film Quarterly, 2024)

"The visionary Italian director Alice Rohrwacher has developed a wildly playful and inventive style of filmmaking over the course of the last decade. Her critically acclaimed features—The Wonders (Grand Prix at Cannes in 2014), Happy as Lazarro (Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2018)—and wondrous shorts—Violettina (2016), Le Pupille (Best Live Action Short Film Nominee in 2022)—set her apart as one of contemporary cinema’s genuine poets whose films exhibit a preternatural mastery of craft and narrative. Her newest film, La Chimera, is a genre-bending exploration of grief and Etruscan art starring Josh O’Connor." - Le Cinéma Club (2024)

"Alice Rohrwacher could be the European arthouse made flesh, or its distilled essence, bottled and preserved for the ages. She’s quoting Italian poets one minute and German poets the next. She’s discussing nature, civilisation and the power of collective memory. She says she makes films to shake us from our lethargy and invite us to reflect on the state of the world. It doesn’t matter whether we even like her films. Like or dislike: that’s beside the point." - Xan Brooks (The Guardian, 2024)

"Alice Rohrwacher makes films in search of wonder, and finds she does not need to go far. It’s there in the ethereal azure of the sky and the crystalline blue of the water; there in the singing, dancing, and aspirations of the young; and there in the lips that hold worker bees and melodies. As the Italian filmmaker sees it, a precious sort of magic sparkles among her people and is threaded through their land. Mirroring the open, curious approach of children and other innocents toward the world, her cinema is as luminous as it is illustrious, uncovering minor miracles in the humble everyday." - MUBI

"If we had to choose one word to define Rohrwacher's filmography, perhaps it would be fable. Her films have a unique ability to construct fictions and immerse audiences in them. A pact of imagination to which the viewer surrenders without resistance. Her fictional journeys are sustained by a painstaking formal construction: the delicate image, always in super 16mm and shot by the cinematographer Hélène Louvart; the meticulous treatment of sound; the coexistence of professional and non-professional actors; and the locations and sets. Like fables, however fanciful or contrived, after having carried the viewer to the end, Rohrwacher's films always end up confronting reality. Like a story whose ending is intertwined with the beginning, in her escape from the documentary through the tools of fiction, Rohrwacher never fails to interrogate the complexities of reality." - Tabakalera

"My references are very broad, and my films have been nourished by me, myself, my imagination, and my dreams. My memory has been nourished by many different films, and by novels, by this very complex inheritance that we have. Personally, I am from the 20th century, and I feel a sort of duty being between these two worlds, the 20th and the 21st century, a duty to be a witness to the world that’s gone by and to talk about the ties between the two." - Alice Rohrwacher (Interview Magazine, 2023)