Small Body: Don’t miss this lush production

Laura Samani’s exquisite first feature – which was recently named best film by the Dublin Film Critics’ Circle at the Dublin International Film Festival – treks a fairytale quest across Italy’s Friuli-Venezia Giulia region toward French Alpine expanses.

As the film opens it’s 1900 and Agata (the remarkable Celeste Cescutti) is an expectant young mother who lets her own blood into the ocean – in accordance with local beliefs – to better protect her pregnancy. Tragically, the ritual proves ineffective. Her daughter is stillborn and – in accordance with contemporaneous Catholic beliefs – doomed to limbo.

Whispers of a faraway church that will allow her child to take a breath, just long enough to perform baptismal rites, spur the grieving mother, against the wishes of her husband, to undertake a perilous journey.

In a series of adventures that play like a scarier Princess Bride, Agata is almost sold off as a wet nurse to a wealthy landowner and has her hair chopped off  in lieu of payment: “Nothing is for nothing”, says her rescuer.

She encounters bandits, cutthroats, and Lynx (played by Roman trans actor Ondina Quadri), a handsome man who was born a girl, who becomes Agata’s travelling companion.

Set before the“Italianisation” or standardisation of Italy, Samani has carefully excavated the terroir of her native north-east. The script, which was cowritten with Marco Borromei and Elisa Dondi, utilises the regional dialect and is based on folk tales of a supposedly miraculous local sanctuary where unbaptised infants were briefly reanimated. Celeste Cescutti leads a parochial cast that is largely unprofessional, with a fierce performance that bosses and grounds the film’s magic realist themes.

Mitja Licen’s lush cinematography picks out earthy tones and textures; Chiara Dainese’s swoon-making music and gorgeous production and costume designs (from Rachele Meliadò and Loredana Buscemi, respectively) create a world where voguish conceits like gender fluidity and female autonomy seamlessly coexist with religious superstition.

Don’t miss it.