The ending is remarkable, making eloquent use of Agata’s reverence for water that has so influenced her life by the ocean. Whatever your beliefs, you will find this film a powerful emotional experience. (Review: Patrick Compton)
Small Body is one of the films on the forthcoming European Film Festival in South Africa which goes hybrid for its 9th edition between October 13 and 23, 2022.
Sometimes poetry can beguile you into becoming mesmerised, or at least temporarily captured, by something that wouldn’t otherwise make a lot of logical sense.
Writer-director Laura Semani’s film debut is one such movie, based on folk tales originating from north-eastern Italy. Set in 1900, the film’s premise concerns a beautiful Italian woman, Agata, who lives in a fishing community. We first meet her, very pregnant, on the beach as she has her palm sliced by an old woman. As she walks into the sea her blood spills into the water, a ceremony that is supposed to guarantee the safe birth of her child.
Sadly, real life is rarely sensitive to human ceremony and Agata’s daughter is still-born. The local (Catholic) priest informs her that, because the child has died before being baptised, it is fated to be lost in limbo, a kind of purgatory, for ever.
The devastated mother learns, however, that there is a religious sanctuary in the nearby mountains where dead babies can somehow be induced to briefly revive and take a final breath, enabling them to be baptised and thus saved.
Leaving behind her indifferent husband (“we will have other children”), Agata sets off on a journey that she hopes will save her child’s soul.
That is enough of the film’s plot which viewers may or may not find compelling. What is remarkable, though, is the way that director Semani composes her narrative, turning it into a kind of female-powered metaphor for hope and determination and love as Agata undergoes many trials in her mission to “save” her child, strapped to her back in a tiny coffin.
This is a beautifully shot, magic-realist cinema poem, wonderfully photographed by Mitja Licen and further enriched by a gorgeous soundtrack by Chiara Dainese. Celeste Cescutti is completely convincing as Agata and trans actor Ondina Quadri is impressive as the semi-feral Lynx, Agata’s companion on her journey.
The European Film Festival 2022 is screened online and runs from October 13 to 23, with all movies screened for free. There are also some showings in cinemas in Cape Town and Johannesburg. For more information, click on the Festival logo to the right of this article or visit www.eurofilmfest.co.za
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