Corpo celeste

Synopsis

A church in Reggio Calabria awaits the arrival of an old crucifix from an abandoned village just as a group of teenagers are about to receive their confirmation. One of the students in catechism class is 13-year-old Marta, who has recently moved back to southern Italy from Switzerland and is struggling to find her place in the world among the church’s rigid traditions while she ponders the various meanings of the body: the cross, the body of Christ, illness, growth and transformation, sensuality and desire, the loss of innocence, violence and the way the system manages people’s bodies…

Alice Rohrwacher’s debut feature is a modest, accessible film with a keen eye for characters away from the limelight, weighed down by religion and popular traditions. Nature, however, will always get the better of civilisation in the end

Bio/Filmo

Director, screenwriter and cinematographer Alice Rohrwacher (Fiesole, 1981) has undergone a spectacular rise in European cinema, thanks to her innocent, accessible and highly poetic style. Her films are full of spirituality, tradition and religion, often cloaked by a vivid imagination, and have played at Sundance, London and Cannes, where Le meraviglie (2014) won the Grand Prix and Lazzaro felice (2018) won the Award for Best Screenplay.

Hélène Louvart (Pontarlier, 1964) has an acclaimed career as a director of photography, with over a hundred projects to her name since graduating from the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière in the mid-1980s. Praised for her naturalistic style that never strays too far from reality, she has worked with the likes of Wim Wenders, Agnès Varda, Marc Recha, Claire Denis, Virginie Despentes and Jaime Rosales. She won the WIFTS Foundation Cinematographer Award in 2012 and the Marburger Kamerapreis in 2018 and has twice been nominated twice for a Gaudí Award.