Italian director Alice Rohrwacher's new film explores the concept of Chimera, something wildly imaginative that we all yearn for but never manage to find.
For the band of tombaroli, thieves of ancient grave goods and archaeological wonders, the Chimera means redemption from work and the dream of easy wealth. For Arthur, the Chimera looks like the woman he lost, Beniamina. To find her, Arthur challenges the invisible, searches everywhere, goes inside the earth - in search of the mythical door to the afterlife. In an adventurous journey between the living and the dead, between forests and cities, between celebrations and solitudes, the intertwined destinies of these characters unfold, all in search of the Chimera.
"Life around me was made up of different parts /.../: you only had to dig up a few centimetres of soil and the fragment of an artefact made by someone else's hands would appear among the pebbles. What era was it looking at me from? You only had to go into the barns and wine cellars round about to realise that they had once been something else: Etruscan tombs, maybe, or shelters from bygone ages, or holy sites. The proximity of sacred and profane, of death and life, that characterised the years in which I was growing up has always fascinated me and given a measure to my way of seeing." (Alice Rohrwacher)