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Premiere of The Wonders by Alice Rohrwacher

On the sixth day of activities at the 12^th FICM, Special Guest Alice Rohrwacher presented her latest film The Wonders (2024) at the Cinépolis Morelia Centro.

The young Italian director, a native of Toscany, won the Grand Prix at the 67^th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. In The Wonders, Rohrwacher portrays the life of a family of beekeepers who, apart from the world, see their daily life disrupted with the arrival of a young criminal in the process of reintegration and who is recording a reality show in the town. Alice had previously participated at Cannes with her debut film Corpo Celeste (2011).

The director came to Morelia for the premiere of The Wonders in Mexico, accompanied by Daniela Michel, general director of FICM, who thanked Rohrwacher for attending the festival with her film, which she said fascinated her when she saw it first in Cannes.

In an intimate conversation with the audience, Rohrwacher talked about The Wonders:

Alice Rohrwacher on working with film format in the movie and not digital:

“I worked in film and not digital, first of all for personal and psychological reasons, since I need to see what I did all day. But I don’t want to see the image, I want to see the substance. And above all, because I can’t control everything and the result becomes a surprise.”

Alice Rohrwacher on her way of working in the film:

“Whenever you look for something, you end up finding something different. At first I thought that the film would be about how the landscape is changing. I returned to this region – and it’s very strange how they tried to destroy everything. It has changed a lot and they’ve tried to turn the area into a museum. When you think about making a museum, you think of different levels. People start coming and begin making changes. Then the North Americans arrived and they want to do something else. They remove everything that had been done before and go after that. In the end, I wanted to tell a story in which everything would come together in terms of time, that the past, present and future were united warmly.”

On the difference between working with children and adults in the film:

“I don’t think it’s important if they are children or adults, actors or non-actors. At the end, they are all together, so I don’t know what it’s like to work with just one. But each person expressed something different, since children are connected with tools that actors sometimes lose, and actors are connected with the notion of work that children do not know.”

Alice Rohrwacher will present her film again on Thursday, October 23, at Cinépolis Centro, Sala 5, at 4 pm, and on Friday, October 24, Cinépolis Centro, Sala 3, at 11 am.

 Article by Alejandro M. Azpiri (@nosoyalexalejo)