Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher might be the most caffeinated filmmaker on the Croisette this year. After gifting us her first masterwork in La Chimera (read review) at Cannes 2023, Rohrwacher returns — she has been chosen to chair the Jury of the Caméra d’Or – which means she gets to watch all the debut features on the Croisette.
Beginning with the surprise opening film Partir un jour by Amélie Bonnin, she’ll be moving from Debussy with at least eight offerings in the Un Certain Regard, the same amount in the Directors’ Fortnight section and a half dozen in the Critics’ Week. When all is said and done, Rohrwacher will have taken in approximately 30 films. This is no small task.
We’ll be there LIVE for the Closing Ceremony on the Saturday (May 24th) to see which film wins the prestigious Caméra d’or. Last year it was Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel who won it for Armand. Winners from previous years include Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Riley Keough & Gina Gammell’s War Pony, Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s Murina, César Diaz’s Our Mothers and Lukas Dhont’s Girl – you can watch previous winners in all smiles in our videos below.
Here is the Cannes press release: In her first feature, Heavenly Body (Corpo Celeste), presented at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2011, Alice Rohrwacher explored a rapport with the world made of discoveries and beginnings through the portrait of a thirteen-year-old girl. Her second feature, The Wonders (Le Meraviglie), was selected to compete at the 2014 Festival de Cannes and won the Grand Prix. This personal tale evokes the daily lives of young sisters on an isolated farm, and modern society catching up with them with the filming of a reality show. Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro felice) continues to probe an ideal of innocence perpetually plagued by moral corruption: suddenly freed from the yoke of a landowner who kept peasants in serfdom, Lazzaro is confronted with the violence of the city. Presented in Competition in Cannes in 2018, it tied for the award for Best Screenplay, crowning Alice Rohrwacher’s singular writing talents.
