The 2025 Venice Film Festival is officially underway. There are massively anticipated premieres from some of the world’s most celebrated auteurs in and out of competition, but like most festivals, it’s the little gems in the sidebars or other sections that deserve your attention. One of those films is Carolina Cavalli’s “The Kidnapping of Arabella,” a dramedy in the Orizzonti (or Horizons) section.
Cavalli’s second feature after 2022’s “Amanda,” which also played Venice and TIFF, “Arabella” follows an eight-year-old (newcomer Lucrezia Guglielmino) who decides to run away from her single father (Chris Pine) after meeting Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli), a twentysomething looking for purpose in her life. The movie is mostly a road trip, with Cavalli’s distinct absurdist voice providing some very entertaining and humorous interludes. Her cinematic voice is distinctly her own, but it would not be unfair to compare it slightly with the works of Julio Torres (hopefully she would consider that a compliment).
The Italian filmmaker has also made her mark in the American film industry as a co-screenwriter of Babak Jalali‘s “Freemont,” which debuted at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and took the John Cassevettes Award at the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards.
While “Arabella” has a lot more going for it than the first Italian language role for Pine (he’s having a blast), it’s a great entry point for a filmmaker no doubt looking to expand her audience outside of Italy and Europe. And that’s where we started our conversation last week…
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Playlist: Allow me to be the first person to ask this question before you get asked it about a thousand times. How did you get Chris Pine to star in this movie, and how did you know he could speak Italian, I think, fluently?
Carolina Cavalli: Yes, he’s fluent. I heard he wanted to act in a different language in Italian specifically. So when my agents put me in touch with him, I thought he just maybe wanted to talk about acting in Italian or the industry or how it is shooting in Italian. I wasn’t immediately understood that maybe he could have been interested in playing a character in this film. And then when I realized it, I was very happy about it, and yeah, this is how it happened. And his Italian is good.
Did he have to read the script before he said yes?
When I understood that maybe there was a chance for him to play this character, I immediately asked him, “Can I send you the script?” He read it, and then it happened that he was in Rome when we were having rehearsals in this small, small theater in Rome. And he came, we tried together the part, and his Italian was great, and in the end he told me, “Listen, I want to do it.” And I was very happy.
So you were in rehearsals. Were you still waiting to cast this part up to the beginning of filming? Was this last-minute?
It was a very last-minute casting process for a couple of roles. One was this, and the other one was Granatina [Eva Robin’s], because they’re both very difficult for me, because they’re short, but I would say intense roles. So, I was looking for a very specific actor or actress to play these roles. And I think Chris was perfect for this.
How long did it take you to find Lucrezia Guglielmino, who plays Arabella?
Yeah, very long time. We had auditions with at least 100 little girls, and when I met Lucrezia, she was very shy at the beginning, but only at the beginning, not only for the first five minutes. And then she had cut her bangs herself specifically for the audition. So, I understood she really cared about this, about the playing and the role. And it was the first time for me that I was working with a child. And it was a completely different process and a very special one because I was impressed by her maturity and understanding of how a story was like the beginning, the end, how something that happened to her character affected her way of acting, her emotions. And at the same time, I think kids have a talent for pretending to do something, but also believing in it. So that was really natural and easy for her, I think.
Had she been trying to act professionally before this project?
No, it was her first audition. It was really broad [search]. We gave these little, how do you say, little [fliers] to schools [about the role]. Not specifically to agencies or kids who wanted to be in a film.
Were you looking for a young actress just in the area where you were shooting to make it easier, or did you look all over Italy?
No, all over Italy, at least not too far, because of course, kids would miss school, so it cannot be too far. But yeah, it was a couple of regions, but it was very broad as research, I guess.
What made you cast Benedetta Porcaroli as Hollly, and did you need to have her and Lucrezia audition together to make sure they had the right chemistry you wanted?
Yes. Also, Benedetta Porcaroli was the main character in my previous film.
Oh, right.
But I didn’t want to work with her because, of course, we became friends, but I didn’t want to work with her just because [I didn’t want to]…
…repeat yourself.
[Yes,] and I didn’t reopen the audition for Holly because even if they’re two very different characters, and to me, she has this capability of delivering absurd lines. Giving the impression they’re so not absurd. And, also, she can act as kind of unlikable characters, but she can always make them tender in one way or another.
As you mentioned, there is this wonderfully absurdist tone to what’s going on. And I don’t want to give anything away, but there is an inherent seriousness to the proceedings as well. Do you feel the movie’s a comedy? Do you think it’s a drama? How would you describe it?
I love the absurd tone because I think it mirrors the human experience very well, which is very uncertain and contradictory, and reflects very well the disorientation of modern life. And so, yes, I hope to always find a balance to create also emotional truth for the character and within this tone. And I think it’s totally possible. Maybe it’s not focusing less on reality, and so maybe spending less time in this kind of stories, at least on factual, on reality, and more on humanity. It’s helpful to say exactly what you want to say, how you want to say it. It’s not possible in every story. There are very realistic stories that need to be, of course, rooted, but not in this case, for example, I think.
So, how would you describe Holly’s journey through the film?
I think she’s, as it often happens in stories and films, in life, in trips, road trips, she thinks she’s looking for something, but she actually finds something else. And for me, this is really what makes her grow. It’s the idea that she thinks she has to go back, but the truth is that she has to go forward, and this comes in a way that is very unexpected.
And what would you say Arabella’s story arc is? What do you think this whole adventure means to her? Or is she just there for Holly?
No, I think Arabella doesn’t realize it at the beginning of the story, but she really needs a friend. And when she meets Holly, she doesn’t see really a friend or a person. She sees a person with a car so [that works with] her desire of running away from her family. But what she finds is actually a friend and a feeling of not being alone anymore.
How personal is this specific story to you?
I mean, I began to write this story because I wanted to explore this paradox that you can only live one life as far as we know, but all the other possible lives can always be imagined. And I’m very interested in the effects that this can have on our lives. And I think sometimes we can get distracted from the meaning of things and from our power and our presence in the world. And my strategy was always the less I choose, the less I get stuck in life. So, the more I stay still, the more I have every possibility in the world, but life doesn’t stay still. So yeah, it was not a great strategy.
Based on the phones and automobiles, I think it takes place in the mid-aughts? When does the movie take place in your mind?
Yeah, honestly, I’m not setting my story in a specific historical time, partly because, as we said, it allows me to escape and create a world that reality feels like detached from everything. And this suspending of reality brings me a kind of huge sense of relief. And also, to be completely honest, I don’t know if that’s interesting, but I want to tell contemporary stories, but so many current social dynamics screens now pull away from the cinematic beauty of a story. So, of course, I think for some stories, realism matters more, but not for this kind of story. And I think our push for speed, efficiency, profit, it’s just like we set aside a certain cinematic quality of life, I think.
No, I totally get it. It’s sort of in its own world.
It’s not a specific time, not a specific place. It’s also different from the previous world of the previous film. There were moments in which maybe we had to reuse certain elements, like cans maybe, that we used in the previous film because we still had them. But yeah, no, nobody drinks them. Maybe some elements we realized later that could have been mixed between films, but we didn’t want to create the same world, and we did exactly as we tried with the first film. We designed a map that was not explicit, but at least it helped us to figure out how this word works, like where the cities where is more countryside and where they’re going from here to there.
You shot this last summer because clearly you were trying to shoot while she was out of school. Was there one scene or one sequence that was the hardest to pull off now that you look back on it?
I think all the choices that we had to make for the, let’s say, incidents that we had for the weather or for the budget, we managed to solve them in a very creative way. So I’m very happy with how I reacted to these things because I generally don’t work very well under pressure. I like to prepare myself very well, and every time that things are not really how I expect them, I generally stress out a lot. And there is a scene on the ice, and I’m very scared of ice skating. That for me — I didn’t expect I had to be on skates as well. And probably that was, I felt a bit embarrassed, I must say.
“The Kidnapping of Arabella” has its public premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival on Thursday, August 28.
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Editor-at-Large Gregory Ellwood is one of the entertainment industry's most respected journalists and critics. Based in Los Angeles, he's the only current awards expert who previously worked on Oscar campaigns at a major movie studio. Over the years, he has written for the LA Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Vox, among others. He also co-founded the entertainment news site HitFix, which spawned a legion of influential Emmy and WGA Award-winning alumni.
