Ciné Sunday: La Chimera

A filmmaker constantly seeking to push the scope of cinema, Alice Rohrwacher’s latest film is no exception. Having made its world premiere at Cannes, La Chimera stirs together history, romance and archeology – with a dash of the supernatural – into a dreamy tonic made for those ready to slip into another realm. 

Set in the 1980s, in the former Etruscian landscape of rural Italy, the film follows a vagabond-type character called Arthur (played by Josh O’Connor); an Englishman who embodies the spirit of the Romantics, he is searching for something he can’t quite grasp. As an archeologist, he makes use of his unique skills to aid a ragtag group of tomboroli – local graverobbers – to find ancient tombs filled with artefacts to sell on the black market. 

With stylistic references to cinema history, as with all her work Rohrwacher uses the past to ask questions of the present, challenging us to consider how what we do and what we stand for now might impact the future. What will archeologists dig up in the future, and what will it say about us and the values of our time?