Alice Rohrwacher

Alice Rohrwacher's Italy always sits a little way inside a fairy tale. In Happy as Lazzaro, Lazzaro is one of the tobacco workers exploited in a remote village by the Marchioness Alfonsina de Luna, the Queen of Cigarettes; the years pass, everyone ages, and Lazzaro stays young. That film shared the best screenplay award at Cannes, while The Wonders had brought her the Grand Prize in 2014. In La Chimera, Arthur and a local band of tombaroli live by finding and looting Etruscan tombs through his uncanny gift for locating them; it is set in the early 1980s and comes to rest somewhere between the smell of earth in The Wonders and the fairy-tale air of Happy as Lazzaro, outdoing both for strangeness. Helene Louvart shot its images.