Alice Rohrwacher

In Happy as Lazzaro, a guileless teenager is content sharecropping on an estate for a marquise until a friendship with her son changes what he can see of it. Rohrwacher shoots on grainy 16mm in a near-square frame, so the footage looks unearthed, and lets folk-tale logic sit in the middle of ordinary farm labour without comment. Corpo Celeste puts a thirteen-year-old newly returned to southern Italy in a catechism class of games and pop songs that answers nothing she came to ask; La Chimera has a man digging up Etruscan graves for a woman he has lost. Nobody marks where the realism stops, and after a while you stop hunting for the seam.

Signature

• 16mm and Super 16 in the Academy ratio, grainy enough to look recovered.
• Peasant and underclass work filmed concretely.
• Folk-tale logic admitted into a realist frame with no explanation.
• Non-professional casts beside a few returning regulars.