Themes of faith and loss are explored to great effect in this fairy tale-like Italian drama…
Director: Laura Samani
Starring: Ondina Quadri, Celeste Cescutti, Giacomina Dereani
Running time: 89 minutes
After losing her daughter at birth, a young girl in 1900s Italy, Agata, believes that her baby’s soul will be kept in limbo, unable to be baptised and therefore not freed from original sin – a cruel quirk of Catholicism punishing mothers already traumatised by the loss of their child.
Realising this, Agata – sensitively portrayed by Celese Cescutti – sets out to find a mysterious rural monastery, reputedly able to perform the miracle of breathing just enough life into a child for them to be baptised. Agata hangs onto this glimmer of hope just as tightly as she clutches the wooden box that envelops her stillborn baby, making a treacherous journey through the beautiful rural mountains of Italy. The film too clings onto this magic, as Agata, joined by a fellow traveller Lynx – played by an androgynous-looking Ondina Quadri – travel through a land steeped in the dangers and mysticism of a fairy-tale.
The final twenty minutes are a beautiful and ambiguous combination of hope, loss and acceptance
Director Laura Samani does well to capture this uniquely rural European belief system, an awkward mixture of folklore, mythology and religion that can be both kind and cruel – something our travellers know all too well. Agata and Lynx become closer as their journey goes on, but the pair are eventually separated when Lynx returns home, to face their own trauma.
As the coldness closes in, Agata seems to wrestle with the thought that she may just be prolonging her grief, but the film’s final twenty minutes are a beautiful and ambiguous combination of hope, loss and acceptance, shot beautifully by Samani and cinematographer Mitja Ličen. For a film based around the loss of a child, Small Body manages to give us something to hold onto.
Did you know? This is director Laura Samani’s feature-length debut. She previously explored the theme of religious faith in her 2016 short film The Sleeping Saint.
Small Body is in cinemas from Friday 29th April
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