When a director gets to the point where Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan, Jessie Buckley, and Josh O'Connor all say yes to a project titled Three Incestuous Sisters, you know you've arrived. That's the position Alice Rohrwacher is in, and frankly, it's long overdue.
Rohrwacher, the Italian writer-director behind Happy as Lazzaro (2018) and last year's La Chimera, has spent the past decade making films that feel like they're beamed in from another era—one where cinema still believed in magic realism, class consciousness, and the idea that a movie doesn't need to explain itself to be profound. According to Deadline, production on Three Incestuous Sisters is set to begin later this year, with plot details still under wraps.
Here's what we know: the title comes from a Audre Lorde poem, which should tell you this isn't going to be a light family dramedy. Lorde's work was about identity, power, marginalization, and the ways intimacy can be both sanctuary and cage. If Rohrwacher is adapting that thematically, we're in for something challenging.
For those unfamiliar with Rohrwacher's work, Happy as Lazzaro is the entry point: a fable about a kind-hearted peasant boy living on an isolated estate in rural Italy, unaware that the outside world has moved on from feudalism. It's equal parts Pier Paolo Pasolini and Terrence Malick, with a twist of magical realism that somehow makes sainthood and exploitation feel like the same thing. It won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes and should have been Italy's Oscar submission, but the Italian film board has never been good at recognizing their best exports.
