This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with The Tale of King Crab directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis and NYFF programmer Tyler Wilson.

This rich, engrossing fiction feature debut from documentary filmmakers Rigo de Righi and Zoppis takes storytelling itself as its subject. Based on a legendary figure about whom the filmmakers first heard while making their previous collaboration, 2015’s Il Solengo, this rousing, bifurcated tale follows the improbable adventures of Luciano, played by a bewitching Gabriele Silli, a village outcast in late-19th-century rural Italy. In the film’s first half, set in the countryside near Rome, his life is undone by alcohol, forbidden love, and an escalating quarrel with a local aristocrat; in the second, Luciano is in the distant Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego, hunting for a mythic treasure with the help of a compass-like crab. Rigo de Righi and Zoppis have created a highly unconventional narrative of redemption, alternating images of grandeur and folkloric idiosyncrasy

The Tale of King Crab opens exclusively in our theaters this Friday. Click here for showtimes and tickets.

Watch/listen to the discussion on the film below and don’t forget to subscribe on iTunesSpotify, or Stitcher for more filmmaker conversations.