The story told by Alice Rohrwacher in her film, which won the award for Best Screenplay at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, is a fantasy-filled compromise between fairy-tale and drama. The world as the peasants that work for the Marquise De Luna know it seems stuck in a Medieval system in which sharecropping is still very much the system.
The town of Inviolata is reconstructed in old houses in the hills of Lazio, more specifically in the picturesque Civita di Bagnoregio, known as the ‘dying town’, and in the small hamlet of Vetriolo in the province of Viterbo. For the rural locations in the film, shooting also took place in Castel Giorgio in Umbria, which lies on the Alfina Plateau in the province of Terni.
When the protagonists are taken from their closed-off bubble in the countryside to the harshness of modern civilisation, the scenery changes completely, dividing the film into two parts that are clearly identifiable, also visually.
The urban locations in which the characters find themselves years later include the city of Milan, as well as Turin and Civitavecchia. We catch glimpses of districts in the centre of the city and the suburbs that could be those of any other modern-day city, where the rules for survival are a lot harder and more difficult to follow.
The story told by Alice Rohrwacher in her film, which won the award for Best Screenplay at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, is a fantasy-filled compromise between fairy-tale and drama. The world as the peasants that work for the Marquise De Luna know it seems stuck in a Medieval system in which sharecropping is still very much the system.
The town of Inviolata is reconstructed in old houses in the hills of Lazio, more specifically in the picturesque Civita di Bagnoregio, known as the ‘dying town’, and in the small hamlet of Vetriolo in the province of Viterbo. For the rural locations in the film, shooting also took place in Castel Giorgio in Umbria, which lies on the Alfina Plateau in the province of Terni.
When the protagonists are taken from their closed-off bubble in the countryside to the harshness of modern civilisation, the scenery changes completely, dividing the film into two parts that are clearly identifiable, also visually.
The urban locations in which the characters find themselves years later include the city of Milan, as well as Turin and Civitavecchia. We catch glimpses of districts in the centre of the city and the suburbs that could be those of any other modern-day city, where the rules for survival are a lot harder and more difficult to follow.
Tempesta, Amka Films Productions, Ad Vitam Production, Pola Pandora Filmproduktions
In a town suspended in time by the name of ‘Inviolata’ in around the 1990s, several generations of farmers are made to believe by the Marquise Alfonsina de Luna that they have no choice but to be sharecrop farmers on her tobacco plantation. But the friendship between one kind-hearted villager, Lazzaro, and the son of the Marquise, Tancredi, disrupts the balance and reveals her deceit.
