Ad una mela (Viennale-Trailer 2020) Alice Rohrwacher

Shot in Bolsena, the beloved landscape where the filmmaker lives and works, AD UNA MELA is a gem of pure cinema, a game of shadows played in a backyard by a young girl and an apple.

The work of Alice Rohrwacher is born of lightness: a small number of ingredients combined to create an atmosphere of timeless magic. But this apparent lightness is soon revealed to be the fruit of a delicate craft. The shadow fools us and mocks the symbolism that linked together apples and girls for millennia. This reluctant female William Tell finally gives us a brave, defiant look and the imperfect beauty of a piano exercise lends the film the tempo of a spring afternoon. Finally, to frame these images, the sound of a poet’s voice leave us wondering about innocence and beauty.

Those small gestures, captured in mellow light, are a lesson in cinema, an elegy to its oneiric nature, and to its capacity to astonish with nothing but a simple shadow. (Rebecca Depas)