La Chimera

Watch La Chimera (2023) online on iFILM — a dreamy Italian drama-fantasy directed by Alice Rohrwacher and set in the Tuscan countryside of the 1980s. Josh O'Connor plays Arthur, a dishevelled English archaeologist who has just served time in prison and returns to a sun-bleached small town carrying a grief he cannot name and a gift he cannot explain.

Arthur can sense the hollow spaces underground where undisturbed Etruscan tombs lie waiting. A ragtag crew of tombaroli — amateur grave robbers who sell whatever they find to shady antiquities dealers — are very happy to exploit that talent. Arthur goes along with it, but what he is actually looking for is a way into the underworld to reach the woman he lost. Isabella Rossellini and Alba Rohrwacher round out the ensemble.

Shot on 16mm and Super 8 with formats deliberately mixed, the film moves at its own unhurried pace and feels closer to a waking dream than a conventional narrative. It competed at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival. La Chimera rewards the kind of viewer willing to follow a character who is searching for something that may not exist. Stream it online on iFILM.