Quattro Strade

Alice Rohrwacher’s Quattro Strade (Four Roads) is an 8-minute short film that offers a tiny, intimate glimpse of the lockdown life in the tranquil village of Quattro Strade in Tuscany, central Italy, during April 2020. The film opens with the dreamy, ephemeral atmosphere of rural imagery, as Rohrwacher narrates tenderly in Italian, “It’s April. We can’t go near each other, because of a virus. So I thought I’d get close to my neighbors. Thanks to my magic eye, reaching where my body can’t. I don’t know if it will work, I’m not familiar with the camera nor this expired film. But I’ll try” (00:30–01:01). Shot on expired 16mm film stock with a zoom lens, the degraded film stock creates a visual texture that instantly generates a feeling of nostalgia; the flexible zoom lens, on the other hand, allows Rohrwacher to respectfully observe her neighbors in a safe, loving distance. “At the end lives Enza, a solitary countrywoman, with her dog Tiger. Every day, she teaches me about tenacity, and a discrete sense of elegance” (01:41–02:10), Rohrwacher introduces one of her neighbors, an elderly woman named Enza, who relies on a canine friend for companionship as her solitary life is rendered even more confined due to the lockdown measures. Enza helps Rohrwacher adapt to the intensified solitude, “when I feel scared at night, I think of her all alone, and I am no longer afraid” (02:22–02:31).

The short film aligns with the pandemic’s spatial disorientation, it documents a time when the world shrank to the size of a neighborhood. It also expresses a kind of temporal confusion during the lockdown—the way days blur together in rustic life, the way it pauses on urban modernity, stuck in a time that felt like being stuck in the past, or eventually, lost in the present. The composition often frames subjects within their environments—a young child frolicking on the pastoral field, an old man resting on the patio of the house he builds, a woman walking down the idyllic country lane. The lack of drama reflects Rohrwacher’s belief in the significance of those minor moments. Unlike those more explicit “Covid Films”, Quattro Strade does not thematize the pandemic directly. There are no overt signs of crisis, but people with familiar faces, alongside shots of the picturesque landscape. They are assembled into a soothing concoction that is a contemplation of a local community in the time of a global pandemic, where connections are born in isolation.