What lies beneath: Josh O’Connor plays archaeologist Arthur, who gets involved with a network of Italian grave robbers
When Italian director Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro, The Wonders) was growing up in Umbria, she was surrounded by antiquities – and those that robbed them. ‘At night, men used to dig up the graves to find the treasures that were buried inside,’ she recalls. ‘They had been sacred for 2,000 to 3,000 years. But now they were taking out the objects.’
It got her thinking about what might drive someone to tamper with the ‘sacred meaning [of] something that belongs to the past’, resulting in her new film, La Chimera. In it, British actor Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, a young archeologist in 1980s Tuscany who falls in with a group of vagabonds filching Etruscan artefacts from graves before selling them on. As oblique as this sounds, Rohrwacher notes how this was a common practice.