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Film director Alice Rohrwacher: “Making images is a form of faith'

The Italian film-maker’s third movie, Happy As Lazzaro, is being hailed as visionary. Here she discusses her childhood in rural Umbria and why her work is always political

As a child, Italian film-maker Alice Rohrwacher would accompany her parents on road journeys, often at night, transporting the produce of the family beekeeping business. Whenever they arrived somewhere, she would sit in the dark and wonder where she was. “I’d have to work it out from what I could hear, not from what I could see, so I’d listen to the place and the information would enter my mind – and then I’d open my eyes.” That, she says, is why her three feature films all start at night, to put her viewer in the same position. “You have to imagine a world, and then compare the world you imagine with the world outside.”

The universe of Alice Rohrwacher’s films – that’s “Alice” pronounced “A-lee-che” – sometimes resembles the world as we know it, but pure imagination has increasingly played a part. Her debut, Corpo Celeste (2011), was a largely realist drama about a young girl’s Catholic education. Follow-up The Wonders, which won the grand prix in Cannes in 2014, was an impressionistic evocation of Rohrwacher’s childhood, garnished with mischievous satire of Italian TV (Monica Bellucci as a gameshow presenter‑cum‑Etruscan nature goddess).

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Wxk8et

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