La Chimera

Alice Rohrwacher's fourth feature competed at Cannes in 2023, six years after Happy as Lazzaro took the screenplay prize there, and confirmed her as the most distinctive Italian director of her generation. Like everything she makes, it was shot by Hélène Louvart on film — 35mm, 16mm and Super 16 mixed within scenes — which gives the Tuscan light a texture no digital camera has yet managed.

Josh O'Connor plays Arthur, an Englishman with an unexplained talent for finding Etruscan tombs and an unexamined grief he keeps at arm's length; Carol Duarte is Italia, learning singing in exchange for housework, and Isabella Rossellini presides as Flora, the matriarch of a decaying villa. The tombaroli — grave robbers, in a trade that really did strip central Italy through the 1980s — are played as a chorus of chancers, and Rohrwacher keeps sliding the register between social comedy, folk tale and something closer to myth.

The reception was the strongest of her career: 4.09 on Letterboxd across 320,000 ratings, a rare crossover for a film this formally odd, and a run of critics' lists at the end of 2024. It is a film about what you are willing to sell of the past, made by a director who films the present as if it were already an artefact.