Happy as Lazzaro
(Alice Rohrwacher, 2018, 125 min, Italy, Italian with English subtitles, color, DCP)
Confirming her status as a major voice in contemporary Italian cinema, Alice Rohrwacher returns with a film of striking poetry, fusing eccentric fantasy and social critique. Shot on Super 16mm, the film’s grainy sepia tinge is a perfect vehicle for the tale of Lazzaro, an otherworldly young tobacco worker who can seemingly travel through time. Winner of Cannes’ Best Screenplay, Happy as Lazzaro bears witness to two eras of social exploitation through an exhilarating and delirious fable.
— 2018 Cannes Film Festival, Best Screenplay
“Rohrwacher’s new film takes the viewer from an indefinite past—in which an oppressed community of farmers live on a sharecropping estate—to a contemporary urban Italy marked by class stratification… Rohrwacher’s beautiful, painful movie alerts us to the maladies of our time while also providing us with the emotional tools to defeat them. – Many Yáñez, Film Comment
