Adriano Tardiolo (Lazzaro) was scouted in a public high school in Orvieto, closing a search that involved more than a thousand other boys of the same age. Adriano had never done any acting before, but he was convinced to accept the role after getting to know Alice Rohrwacher.
According to writer/director Alice Rohrwacher, the film is "the story of a lesser sanctity, with no miracles, no powers or superpowers, without special effects. It is the sanctity of living in this world without thinking ill of anyone and simply believing in human beings. Because another way was possible, the way of goodness, which men have always ignored but which always reappears to question them. Like something that might have been but that we've never ever wanted."
The story of the film was inspired by a real-life event that Alice Rohrwacher had been struck by, in which a Marchesa in Central Italy exploited the seclusion of some of her lands to keep her peasants in the dark about the end of sharecropping.
With this film, Alice Rohrwacher wanted to use the adventures of Lazzaro to tell the tragedy that has devastated her country, namely the passage from a material Middle Ages to a human Middle Ages: the end of rural civilization, the migration to city boundaries of thousands of people who knew nothing of modernity, their giving up of little to have even less.
Shot on Super 16mm film.