DIRECTOR: Alice Rohrwacher
PRODUCER: Carlo Cresto Dina
PRODUCTION CO: Tempesto, Rai Cinema, Ad Vitam Production, Amka Films Productions
SCREENPLAY: Alice Rohrwacher
PHOTOGRAPHY: Hélène Louvart
EDITOR: Nelly Quettier
WITH: Josh O'Connor (Arthur), Carol Duarte (Italia), Vincenzo Nemolato (Pirro), Alba Rohrwacher (Spartaco), Isabella Rossellini (Flora), Lou Roy-Lecollinet (Mélodie)

FESTIVALS: Cannes

REVIEW

“Alice Rohrwacher’s new film a beguiling fantasy-comedy of lost love: garrulous, uproarious and celebratory in her absolutely distinctive style. It’s a movie bustling and teeming with life, with characters fighting, singing, thieving and breaking the fourth wall to address us directly…

The setting is Riparbella in Tuscany in the 1980s, and Josh O’Connor is tremendous as Arthur, a dishevelled Englishman in a grubby white suit sporting six-day stubble and a perennial cigarette. He is a former archaeological scholar who has assumed the morose, slouching gait and coiled style of a gangster… Using a dowsing rod, Arthur can tell where invaluable Etruscan antiquities are buried and has teamed up with a bizarre homeless gang of grave-robbers to dig them out under cover of darkness.”

– Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

“Shooting fluidly on multiple film formats in the bleachy sky blues and earth tones that have by now become a signature palette, Rohrwacher and her regular DP Hélène Louvart make a virtue of this skittering, literally shape-shifting visual quality, as the shifts in grain, light and frame dimensions from one sequence to the next denote the film’s own transient sense of reality, and the states of earthy pragmatism and mournful reverie between which Arthur hovers. Is he sampling death every time he ventures underground, trying it on for size, at least until he finds something to live for above the surface? Raffish and boyish at the same time—or switching between either mode as a cover for the other—O’Connor’s deft, droll performance implies such possibilities without sentimentalizing them.”

– Guy Lodge, Variety

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

New Plymouth
Wednesday, 04 February, 6.00pm

​​Carterton     
Friday, 27 February, 7.30pm

​Auckland 
Monday, 23 March, 6.00pm

​Tauranga 
Wednesday, 01 April, 6.00pm

​Whanganui   
Monday, 04 May, 7.00pm​

​Nelson 
Wednesday, 13 May, 6.00pm

​Bigger Picture Ōamaru    
Tuesday, 25 August, 7.00pm

​Westport  
Wednesday, 14 October, 7.00pm

​​Palmerston North 
Wednesday, 28 October, 6.00pm

Hamilton
Monday, 09 November, 6.30pm

Wellington
Monday, 23 November, 6.00pm

Wellington
Monday, 23 November, 8.30pm
WORLD CINEMA  >>