Alice Rohrwacher, who visited the Midnight Sun Film Festival in 2014, makes her return this year. Since her last visit a decade ago, the director, screenwriter, and editor, considered one of the leading figures of the new generation of Italian filmmakers, has received an Oscar nomination and secured her permanent spot in the lineups of the world’s top festivals, winning several awards at Cannes. Moving between realism and fairy tales, Rohrwacher’s body of work examines the tensions between city and countryside and past and present, through a playfully cinematic lens.
Rohrwacher was born in the village of Fiesole near Florence to an Italian stay-at-home mother and a German beekeeper father. Her sister, Alba, who also entered the film industry as an actor, is a familiar face in European quality cinema and appears in her sister’s directorial works. After studying literature and philosophy at the University of Turin, Rohrwacher worked in theatre and music before transitioning to film, initially editing documentaries.
Rohrwacher’s films, from her debut Corpo celeste (2011) to The Wonders (2014) and Happy as Lazzaro (2018), as well as the documentary Futura (2021), co-directed with Pietro Marcello and Francesco Munzi, all premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Her charming short film The Pupils (2022), produced by Alfonso Cuarón, brought Rohrwacher and Cuarón an Oscar nomination for best live action short last year. Its music is by the Finnish festival favourite Cleaning Women, whom Rohrwacher got to know during her first visit to Sodankylä. The latest film, La chimera (2023), is a playfully told story about grave robbers in 1980s Tuscany. The film was the first of Rohrwacher’s works to be theatrically released in Finland in the spring.
In Sodankylä, Rohrwacher will present her two newest works as well as two of her own favourites, whose influence on her work is evident. She will introduce the festival audience to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s debut film Accattone (1961) and Yuri Norstein’s animated film Tale of Tales (1979).
Inari Ylinen