Fresh off “La Chimera,” one of 2024’s best films, Alice Rohrwacher is already working on her next film — and it’s one that might surprise even her most ardent admirers.
The Italian filmmaker, known for her blend of magic realism with piercing humanism, has revealed she is prepping to shoot a silent film.
Yes, in an era when blockbuster cinema gets louder and more chaotic, Rohrwacher is moving in the opposite direction — toward silence. A silent film in 2025 sounds like a provocation.
During a June 22 conversation with Gian Luca Farinelli at Bologna’s Cinema Modernissimo, Rohrwacher described the film as both deeply personal and radically experimental. It will be silent in form but rich in sonic texture:
It’s a movie that I care about a lot. The goal is to create an opera in which music is the voice of the film.
The intention here, she emphasized, isn’t some retro homage or stunt. Rohrwacher sees silent cinema not as a museum piece but as a living language — one with untapped potential.
It’s not pretentious, but comes from a deep conviction of [silent cinema’s] communicative power, as a form of experimentation that should continue to exist in parallel to sound cinema. Silent cinema demands precious attention. You can’t do anything but watch a movie. It forces total focus on the image.
And then there’s color — not as decoration but as something to be earned. Rohrwacher reminded viewers that silent films were often deeply colorful, dyed and tinted in symbolically charged ways. “You have to earn the color,” she said, suggesting a more intentional, poetic use of visual elements.
Rohrwacher, whose “Happy as Lazzaro” (2018) made good on the enormous promise of her earlier work, has always made films that blur boundaries — between time periods, between realism and myth, between the visible and the unseen. “La Chimera,” filled with dreamlike ambiguity and narrative shapeshifting, was wonderful.