HAPPY AS LAZZARO

Winner of the Best Screenplay award at this year’s Cannes, Alice Rohrwacher’s enchanting third feature is a magic-realist fable of modern Italy that bends time in unforgettable ways. 

Following up her 2014 Cannes Grand Prix-winning The Wonders, Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s much-anticipated and critically acclaimed new film takes the director’s established mode of fabulist realism to the next level.

Riffing on the legend of St. Francis, Rohrwacher’s tale begins in Italy’s past, where the young, innocent peasant Lazzaro meets cursed nobleman Tancredi in a pastoral village ruled by his mother, Marchesa Alfonsina de Luna, the fearsome ‘queen of cigarettes’. Lazzaro eventually finds himself travelling in time as the film pivots to the present, and Rohrwacher – shooting in the warm glow of super 16mm and influenced by the likes of Pasolini and Taviani – casts a magical spell while crafting an origin story for the corruption of modern-day Italy.

"A genuine UFO of a film that seems to come from another time and place, and certainly another imagination. A delirious brew of modernism, folktale and fabulist invention." – Screen Daily