3 Minutes
Cosimo climbed a tree at twelve and never came down. That stubborn act of childhood rebellion has lodged itself in Italian literature for decades, and now Alice Rohrwacher is preparing to translate that vertiginous vow into film.
The director behind the ethereal, award‑trodden works The Wonders, Happy as Lazzaro and La Chimera will tackle Italo Calvino's 1957 fable The Baron in the Trees, a coming‑of‑age story about Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, the young baron who, after a family quarrel, lives his entire life among branches. Calvino's novel remains one of his most beloved, second only in popular stature to If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.
Production will be led by Rome‑based Our Films, the Mediawan‑owned outfit run by Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Mieli. The duo, who previously produced Pawel Pawlikowski's Fatherland — a Cannes best director winner — negotiated the Calvino rights from the Wylie Agency in 2022 after a lengthy pursuit. Mieli has often said the image that stays with him is not the boy up in the tree but the adult man who honors his promise and the rigor of his disobedience.
Rohrwacher is not stepping away from ambitious choices. She is currently shooting an adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's gothic novel Three Incestuous Sisters, featuring Dakota Johnson, Josh O'Connor, Saoirse Ronan, Jessie Buckley and Isabella Rossellini, with Mick Jagger in a surprise cameo. Early whispers suggest the film leans toward silence — a risky, cinematic language that suits Rohrwacher's sensibilities.
As for The Baron in the Trees, don’t expect cameras to roll until the latter half of 2027. Our Films and Mubi, who have an established co‑production, financing and distribution partnership, will shepherd the project through development and release. Mubi also has a busy slate with the U.S. theatrical release of Fatherland this fall and the upcoming Italian‑Belgian romance Let Love In from Felix Van Groeningen, which reunites the director with actor Luca Marinelli and is tipped for Venice.
The challenge is clear: how do you film a life lived aloft without turning it into a gimmick? Rohrwacher knows atmospheres. She knows how to let the surreal breathe alongside the mundane. If anyone can give Calvino's canopy renewed cinematic life — one branch, one promise at a time — it's her.
Expect slow, deliberate choices. Expect strange, luminous moments. And then, perhaps, a long, quiet ladder leading back to the ground, only when the story says so.
Source: variety
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