With only four films, Alice Rohrwacher (Fiesole, 1981) has established herself as the most interesting Italian director of her generation, weaving a poetic and earthly cinema, between fable and reality, as evidenced by Corpo celeste, The Wonderland or Lazzaro feliz. With La chimera, which he presents at a D'A Film Festival that honors him with the Honor award, he takes a step forward in his cinematography by narrating the adventures of Arthur, a young Englishman at a loss for words (Josh O' Connor, seen in The crown ) who has just been released from prison and joins a gang of tombaroli , robbers of ancient tombs, especially Etruscans, while trying to find his beloved Beniamina. A story that will arrive in cinemas on April 19 and that is about life, death, the past, the present and especially property.
When did you first hear about tombaroli?
I grew up in a place like the one in the movie, a place where there was a kind of treasure hunt. Many times I would see them at the bar and they would talk about the previous night's finds. These miscreants, so to speak, scared me a little. Not so much because they were doing illegal things, but because they were taking things from the dead, even if it was dead people from 2,000 years ago. I started talking to them to understand well where they found pride and the right to open what was sacred. And I understood that, even if they saw themselves as thieves, in reality they were the healthy children of a sick system, of a materialistic world that no longer believes in anything and that sees the possibility of entering these tombs and stealing. In fact, all this has changed because the law has changed. From the late 1970s until the 2000s there was a lot of demand from museums, collectors and individuals for unique archaeological objects. There was no clear legislation protecting all these objects. Wherever there is a market, traffic is generated. The journalist Fabio Isman said that there came a point that all this traffic generated figures higher than those of the drug market.
Is this everyone's or no one's? It is a question that is uttered several times in the film. Who do you think the art is?
The film turns on the idea of ownership, who owns things and who they will be. I like to think of archaeologists as guardians of everything that ends. When we are not there, perhaps we should reflect on what we will leave behind. Traveling into this underground world of objects created for souls, the thought that someone would waste years of their life doing manual labor and then hide it seems crazy. Instead, there were civilizations that did it that way. As a director, I think it doesn't really matter whose film it is. It matters that it exists and has been done.
What fascinates you about the Etruscan civilization? Mélodie says that if they still existed there wouldn't be so much masculinity in Italy...
Well, maybe fascism is a consequence of masculinity, to go further. What I like about the Etruscan civilization is that it is like the layer under which I live. You scratch anywhere and pieces come out that someone left a long time ago. It is the civilization I have been most in touch with since I was a child. We live in houses that have already been lived in, in lands that have already been inhabited. I think that the Etruscans were a fairly peaceful civilization, in which men and women lived fairly equally, and hence the desire to introduce this point in the film to remind us that the patriarchy's decision is not a natural condition of the human being, but a historical decision and I hope that times are coming when this will begin to change.
What was it like working with Josh O'Connor and Isabella Rossellini?
The only problem is that after working with them I only want to work with them. I'm desperate thinking about projects together (laughs). They are two extremely generous and imaginative people. It was very nice to put them in contact with my neighbors who are actors.
