Italian Film Club: Happy as Lazzaro | Nerve Cinema
Date: 25 September 2025
Venue: Nerve Centre, 7-8 Magazine Street, Derry, Derry, BT48 6HJ
Mixing folk tales with social critique, biblical allegories and pop culture references, this kaleidoscopic film deservedly won the Best Screenplay award at 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
Following in the cinematic footsteps of Pasolini and Fellini, Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher's follow-up to The Wonders is a luminous magic-realist fable that doubles as an origin myth for a modern Italy consumed by corruption and decline.
Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo) is a beautiful peasant whose sweet nature makes people mistake him for simple-minded. He happily does the bidding of anyone in his local village, which is ruled over by the Cruella de Vil-esque Marchesa (Nicoletta Braschi), and finds an unlikely friend in Marchesa's petulant, bleach-blonde son Tancredi, who convinces his hapless ally to help him stage a dramatic incident to secure a ransom.
Beautifully shot on Super 16mm by Rohrwacher's regular cinematographer Hélène Louvart and incorporating some truly stunning imagery, the film's textured sepia tinge evokes both a nostalgia for rural innocence and the melancholy of urban decay.