Director: Alice Rohrwacher
Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera drifts through rural Italy on the trail of a scruffy English archaeologist who seems to have one foot in the world of the dead.
What is La Chimera about?
Fresh out of prison and still haunted by the memory of a woman he lost, Arthur falls back in with a loose band of grave robbers who scrape together a living looting Etruscan burial sites and reselling whatever turns up. For the rest of the crew it is an easy hustle, but Arthur's motives run deeper: he is chasing a half-mythical passage said to open onto the underworld, convinced it might somehow lead him back to the woman he cannot let go of. The film wanders between sunbaked hillsides, crumbling tombs and small-town markets, folding folklore, dry comedy and quiet grief into a shaggy, unhurried road story about a man who keeps digging long after he has stopped believing he will find what he wants.
Cast & crew
Josh O'Connor anchors the ensemble as Arthur, playing him with a rumpled, half-checked-out stillness that suits the character's grief, while Isabella Rossellini, Alba Rohrwacher and Carol Duarte round out a cast that moves easily between slapstick energy and quiet melancholy, often within the same scene.
Context & significance
Writer-director Alice Rohrwacher shot the film across rural stretches of Italy, drawing on the country's long and uneasy history with tomb raiding and the black market in ancient artifacts. Mixing 35mm, 16mm and Super 16 stock gives the story a rough, lived-in texture that recalls an older strain of Italian cinema while still feeling distinctly hers, and the production's spread across several European countries reflects how widely her filmmaking network reaches.
Where & how to watch
La Chimera streams on K-Time with a Persian dub, and the platform's Farsi-first interface makes it easy to find and follow along scene by scene. Watching the film does require signing in with a free K-Time account, though this page and everything written on it stays open to read without logging in first.