Sante

Directed by Valeria Gaudieri

With Greta Santi, Beatrice Bartoni and Rosa Vannucci

Bianca is 12 years old when she is chosen to play the angel — a symbol of purity and grace — at her town fair. As she prepares for the moment when she will be lifted off the ground, her encounter with Ginevra fractures the surface of childhood and opens a crack from which a new and unsettling desire seeps in. In a suspended time and place, the film covers the imperceptible yet radical transition between imposed purity and awareness of one’s own body, between childhood and adulthood. A female coming-of-age tale that investigates — through its hagiographic and apocryphal aesthetic — the symbolic construct of grace and the inherited weight of guilt.