In the years since her breakthrough role in 1986’s Blue Velvet, Isabella Rossellini has established herself as one of the great actresses in modern cinema with amazing performances in films such as Death Becomes Her, Wild at Heart, Fearless, Big Night, The Funeral, Left Luggage, The Impostors, The Saddest Music in the World, Two Lovers, Brand Upon the Brain!, Incredibles 2, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Problemista, and now Alice Rohwacher’s magical La Chimera. In recent years, she has also expanded into filmmaking with works including Green Porno, Seduce Me, and Animals Distract Me. She has been part of numerous projects celebrating her beloved parents, actress Ingrid Bergman and film director Roberto Rossellini, as well as actively supporting local movie theaters, including the Cinema Arts Centre, and Patchogue’s excellent Plaza Cinema & Media Arts Center. She is the author of several books, including the best-selling memoir Some of Me, and is an active campaigner for wildlife conservation.
La Chimera: With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher conjures a marvelous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the ancient and the modern. Josh O’Connor (The Crown) stars as Arthur, a ne’er-do well Englishman, handsomely rumpled and recently out of prison, who returns to a rural town in central Italy where he hesitantly reconnects with a ragtag group of tombaroli (tomb raiders), for whom he uses his uncanny powers of divination to locate graves that date back to the Etruscan period and teem with antiquities of immense value to collectors and museums. Yet the melancholy Arthur has other ghosts on his mind, including his long-lost love Beniamina, who haunts his memory like her own ghostly civilization. Featuring gorgeous rough-hewn textures from the great cinematographer Hélène Louvart and outstanding performances from Isabella Rossellini, Carol Duarte, and Alba Rohrwacher, La Chimera is a dreamlike descent into a majestically tattered world right beneath our own.
Cost: $60 Public | $50 Members
