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The bizarre tale of an Italian village drunk which switches to a crustacean-assisted treasure hunt aims for warped horror but doesn’t always get it right

A group of elderly Italian men sit around drinking red wine, eating spaghetti and trading local folk stories passed down by their parents and grandparents. It was different back then, explains one old boy; there was no TV, so people had to sit around talking of an evening (though sitting around talking is precisely what this lot are doing). He tells the tale of Luciano, the illegitimate son of a local doctor sometime in the 19th century. It’s a dark story, he warns. Though possibly not dark enough. What first-time feature directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis seem to be going for here is a Herzogian waking nightmare, but the necessary sense of horror and despair never fully comes off.

Their...

In the Italian town of Vejano, local hunters gather to share stories rich enough to inspire movies. Over the past decade, filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis have been dutifully documenting these sessions — some fact-based, others blurring the lines of reality — translating them to screen via films that entertain, while also testing what audiences might believe. The first two, “Belva Nera” (about a black panther sighting) and “Il Solengo” (focused on an enigmatic recluse), were fashioned as nonfiction portraits, but the latest legend proved fanciful enough to call for a more narrative approach. And thus, “The Tale of King Crab” was born.

Debuting in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes last summer, this surprising account of a curious cross-continental quest already feels timeless, like one of Pasolini’s classic allegorical films (“The Arabian Nights”) or Alice Rohrwacher’s more recent, loosely fact-based “Happy as Lazzaro.” It’s an old-fashioned literary fable,...

"A man who kills, where does he go?" Oscilloscope Labs has revealed an official US trailer for a peculiar, fascinating little Italian film called The Tale of King Crab. This one originally premiered in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar at last year's Cannes Film Festival, and it also stopped by the Karlovy Vary, New York, and Vienna Film Festivals last year. When this begins, elderly hunters are reminiscing about the local tale of Luciano. Luciano lived as a wandering drunkard in a remote village. Spiteful actions ensue between him and the prince of the region over passage through an ancient gateway. Fueled by passions and jealousy, these actions result in a horrible misdeed. Now an unfortunate criminal, Luciano is exiled to the distant Tierra del Fuego where, with the help of ruthless gold-diggers, he searches for a mythical treasure, paving his way towards redemption. However, in these lands, only greed and insanity can prevail.

A rare and elusive sense of myth is captured in The Tale of King Crab, a story of a 19th-century vagabond who falls in love with the daughter of a local farmer only to run afoul of a prince. (Tough luck.) Later on, astonishingly, he finds himself on the other side of the world.

With that kind of spatial and temporal scope, it’s remarkable that Crab is only the first narrative feature from Italian filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, a duo whose output, while ostensibly non-fiction to this point, has often played on the boundary of fable. Small traces of both Black Beast (their 2013 short about a legendary animal) and Il Sonengo (their 2018 feature documentary about a lone hermit) can be located in Crab, a film with all the texture of a folktale—one passed through generations, the facts blurring and embellishments only growing more ethereal with each retelling.

For their narrative debut, documentary filmmakers Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis tackle a two-pronged film whose two halves share visions of one another, as well as a few familiar faces, but only ever-so-gently collide across disparate worlds. “The Tale of King Crab” divides its time between 19th-century rural Italy and the coast of the southernmost tip of Argentina. Part Herzogian ecstatic ethnography given the verisimilitude at play in the film’s naturalistic settings, and part Pasolinian picaresque in its portrayal of a louche, sotted antihero tumbling through folly upon folly,, despite a bifurcated structure that makes for two occasionally tantalizing films in one.

At its core, the film is about the feint of storytelling itself, a well-worn topic that can make for a frustrating viewing experience when the directors are trying to go too deep inside their own heads. There’s a framing device that sets up the...

The Wonders

Directed by Alice Rohrwacher

Italy, 2014

Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu) is a 12 year-old head of household in a family of beekeepers. Her father Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck) keeps a tight watch on the business in their isolated plot of land in the Tuscan region. Two new events – the arrival of a reality TV show, and of a young boy, Martin (Luis Huilca) – change her world dramatically.

The opening of Alice Rohrwacher’s transcendent film is at once beautifully disjointed and metaphorical. A group of hunters move through the pitch-blackness only to suddenly and surprisingly come across the beekeeper’s house, secluded almost to the point of comedy.

The setup feels allegorical: the hunters are the real world, Gelsomina and company are a fiction, and the reality TV show will somehow bridge that gap. It’s not the only moment where Rohrwacher’s film feels nearly magical – a camel in the backyard,...

Being the winner of a top prize at one of the film world’s most prestigious festivals, particularly one that makes its home in France in the first half of the calendar year, should mean a quick and rave review-filled run right into at least major arthouse theaters across these United States. However, if you’re director Alice Rohrwacher, an award from the Cannes Film Festival apparently means sitting on a shelf waiting for a release for almost 18 months.

That’s the case with her sophomore effort, The Wonders. A superb follow up to her great debut film, Corpo Celeste, Wonders earned a Grand Prix award from the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, and is now finally arriving in theaters thanks to the geniuses at Oscilloscope Laboratories.

Very much a distant cousin of the great Poetic Realism movement seen in ‘30s French cinema, Rohrwacher’s film is a dreamlike ode to...

Alice Rohrwacher’s national background makes it understandable, albeit a bit too easy, for one to draw connections between her latest writing-directing effort, The Wonders, and tenets of neorealist and post-neorealist Italian filmmaking. This sense is immediate in the moment — the costuming, the farm life (speaking for both work and environment), the dramatic conflict at its center — and a bit ineffable in retrospect. Take it with a grain of salt, then, when I say this is a film that not only understands the myriad feelings tied to poverty, but how they can so often collide with one’s hope for their future like two cannonballs fired at full speed.

What sparked the thought was, appropriately enough, The Wonders’ dramatic center: a patriarch, Wolfang, who, as portrayed by Sam Louwyck, comes as close to Anthony Quinn’s Zampanó as any performance in recent memory. A brutish, occasionally cruel father rules over three girls (the oldest,...

The St. Louis International Film Festival has announced the films nominated for the Awfj Eda Awards.

Awfj will partner once again with Sliff to recognize the Best Female-Directed Narrative Feature and Best Female-Directed Documentary. The 24th Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival will be held Nov. 5-15, 2015. Check out the full lineup here.

Here’s a glimpse of the films that have been selected:

Narratives

Fidelio: Alice’S Odyssey – Lucie Borleteau (France)

A rare woman in the man’s world of seafaring, 30-year-old Alice signs on as a replacement engineer on the freighter Fidélio. Although she loves her job and does it well, Alice remains a woman even when wearing greasy blue overalls, and there’s some doubt that the all-male crew will remain totally insensitive to her charms. The situation has further complications: Alice has a fiancé back on shore, but when she discovers that the Fidélio is captained by Gaël,...

After premiering at Cannes, Corpo celeste director Alice Rohrwacher‘s Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) will finally touch down in the United States the end of the month Also starring Monica Bellucci and Alba Rohrwacher, we noted the film has been “praised for its alternation of intimacy and universality, tightness and openness, and the mixing of verisimilitude with wonder.”

Following the story of fourteen-year-old Gelsomina who lives in the Umbrian countryside with her sweetly dysfunctional family, we’re pleased to exclusively debut a clip, courtesy of Oscilloscope. The preview features one of the most memorable sequences from the film in which Gelsomina first shows off her bit of performance art with the bee.

Check it out below, along with the poster, for the film starring Monica Bellucci, Alba Rohrwacher, André Hennicke, Margarete Tiesel, Sabine Timoteo, and Sam Louwyck. One can also see the U.S. trailer here.

Synopsis:

Winner of the...

Excellent performances, natural light and lovely locations make up for the flimsiest of plots in Alice Rohrwacher’s rural rites-of-passage drama

Terrific performances from the ensemble cast bring warmth and insight to this Cannes Grand Prix winner about an alt-lifestyle family eking out a breadline existence as beekeepers in the Tuscan wilds. When a television crew filming the surreally tacky “Countryside Wonders” competition rolls up, 12-year-old Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu, brilliant) is transfixed by the spectacle of Monica Bellucci’s rural goddess and resolves to get her own family on the show. But Sam Louwyck’s gruff patriarch, Wolfgang, is opposed to any such selling out, despite the family’s urgent need for money. The plot may be gossamer-thin but the characters are sturdily drawn and life on the farm engrossingly evoked. Natural light captured on 16mm film adds earthy texture to the drama, while images of bees crawling from...

Oscilloscope Laboratories have made a pre-Cannes double deal. Slightly misleading, they’ve actually picked up a pair that had not yet to be picked up since they had their premieres at the 2014 edition of the festival. O-scope have landed Alice Rohrwacher’s Grand Prix winning (2nd place award after the Palme d’Or) The Wonders which was high up on several Best undistributed films of ’14, while Daniel Wolfe’s directorial debut Catch Me Daddy was a Directors’ Fortnight entry that had it’s supporters. O-Scope will release both films later this year. Additionally, they’ve landed one of the better undiscoverd gems from the Toronto Int. Film Fest last fall in Javier Fuentes-León‘s The Vanished Elephant.

Gist: Rohrwacher’s sophomore film is set at the end of summer and follows Gelsomina and her three younger sisters. She is the designated heir of the strange, secluded kingdom that her...

"Set in rustic central Italy, The Wonders revolves around a family that bears traces of writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s own," writes Melissa Anderson for Artforum. "The filmmaker, like her adolescent protagonist Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), the oldest of four girls, is the daughter of a German father and an Italian mother who make their living as beekeepers. Similar to its predecessor, Corpo Celeste, an Nyff selection in 2011, The Wonders is an uncommonly graceful coming-of-age story, rooted as much in the fantastical as the material." We've got more reviews and two clips. » - David Hudson...

"Set in rustic central Italy, The Wonders revolves around a family that bears traces of writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s own," writes Melissa Anderson for Artforum. "The filmmaker, like her adolescent protagonist Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), the oldest of four girls, is the daughter of a German father and an Italian mother who make their living as beekeepers. Similar to its predecessor, Corpo Celeste, an Nyff selection in 2011, The Wonders is an uncommonly graceful coming-of-age story, rooted as much in the fantastical as the material." We've got more reviews and two clips. » - David Hudson...

Opening Night – World Premiere

Gone Girl

David Fincher, USA, 2014, Dcp, 150m

David Fincher’s film version of Gillian Flynn’s phenomenally successful best seller (adapted by the author) is one wild cinematic ride, a perfectly cast and intensely compressed portrait of a recession-era marriage contained within a devastating depiction of celebrity/media culture, shifting gears as smoothly as a Maserati 250F. Ben Affleck is Nick Dunne, whose wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing on the day of their fifth anniversary. Neil Patrick Harris is Amy’s old boyfriend Desi, Carrie Coon (who played Honey in Tracy Letts’s acclaimed production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is Nick’s sister Margo, Kim Dickens (Treme, Friday Night Lights) is Detective Rhonda Boney, and Tyler Perry is Nick’s superstar lawyer Tanner Bolt. At once a grand panoramic vision of middle America, a uniquely disturbing exploration of the fault lines in a marriage,...