Ad una mela

The Viennale’20 trailer is directed by Alice Rohrwacher, undoubtedly one of the most original voices in contemporary cinema, who already opened the festival in 2018 with LAZZARO FELICE.
Shot in Bolsena, the beloved landscape where the filmmaker lives and works, AD UNA MELA is a gem of pure cinema, a game of shadows played in a backyard by a young girl and an apple.
The work of Alice Rohrwacher is born of lightness: a small number of ingredients combined to create an atmosphere of timeless magic. But this apparent lightness is soon revealed to be the fruit of a delicate craft. The shadow fools us and mocks the symbolism that linked together apples and girls for millennia. This reluctant female William Tell finally gives us a brave, defiant look and the imperfect beauty of a piano exercise lends the film the tempo of a spring afternoon. Finally, to frame these images, the sound of a poet’s voice leave us wondering about innocence and beauty.
Those small gestures, captured in mellow light, are a lesson in cinema, an elegy to its oneiric nature, and to its capacity to astonish with nothing but a simple shadow. (Rebecca Depas, Viennale Catalogue 2020)