The film is a coming-of-age story, the coming-of-age of Marta who, as a teenager, is preparing to receive the sacrament of Confirmation. Her coming-of-age also involves adapting to a new reality (the girl lived in Switzerland for 10 years): we see her scrutinising the buildings of Reggio Calabria from above, this being a new, anonymous and unrecognisable landscape to her. It’s a landscape that returns often in the film, including when, in one scene in the film, Marta walks along the edge of the road, leaving the skeletons of unfinished buildings, clusters of cement, scaffolding, rubbish, and dirt behind her.
There comes a point when Marta finds herself in Roghudi (RC), a small town in Bovesia grika that has been abandoned by its community following a flood at the beginning of the 1970s. Here at last, as she enters the abandoned parish church and finds the old priest, the only inhabitant of the town, she finds the answers to some of her questions.
The film is a coming-of-age story, the coming-of-age of Marta who, as a teenager, is preparing to receive the sacrament of Confirmation. Her coming-of-age also involves adapting to a new reality (the girl lived in Switzerland for 10 years): we see her scrutinising the buildings of Reggio Calabria from above, this being a new, anonymous and unrecognisable landscape to her. It’s a landscape that returns often in the film, including when, in one scene in the film, Marta walks along the edge of the road, leaving the skeletons of unfinished buildings, clusters of cement, scaffolding, rubbish, and dirt behind her.
There comes a point when Marta finds herself in Roghudi (RC), a small town in Bovesia grika that has been abandoned by its community following a flood at the beginning of the 1970s. Here at last, as she enters the abandoned parish church and finds the old priest, the only inhabitant of the town, she finds the answers to some of her questions.
Marta, a 13 year-old girl who has spent 10 years of her life in Switzerland, is back living with her mother and sister on the outskirts of Reggio Calabria where she was born. As her confirmation approaches, she starts attending Sunday school at her local parish church.
