Alice Rohrwacher, one of the most important filmmakers working in contemporary independent cinema, draws on much of the classical Italian tradition, exploring themes connected to popular culture, rurality, community and family identity, and spiritual inquiry. Contrary to the neorealist aesthetic, however, her films take a sensorial, poetic approach with a strong documentary feel. Heavenly Body, her first feature-length film, shifts precisely between realism and symbolism, following the daily life of Marta, the protagonist, as she adapts to a new place and confronts tensions between displays of faith, a changing body and her search for identity and belonging in the world. The film also reflects social friction in contemporary Italy, bringing up themes such as the relationship between politics and the Church, religion, rites of passage from childhood to adolescence and, finally, the disconnection between traditional and contemporary values.

In this film, the theme of childhood emerges as a kind of pretext to position us in the place of the camera, which thus looks at the world with amazement, doubt, fear and strangeness. Across Alice Rohrwacher’s films — and this aspect is already present in this coming-of-age debut — children or young teenagers develop between the innocence of childhood and the existential dilemmas that arise as identity is formed. In this film, the children are truly at the centre of things, witnesses and protagonists of a world full of social, religious and familial ambiguities. They are figures in transformation, immersed in the processes of learning and discovery, discord and alienation.

The main character in Heavenly Body, Marta, is a 13-year-old who, after ten years living in Switzerland, returns to the deep south of Italy, to Reggio Calabria, the city where she was born. Back in Italy with her mother and older sister, Marta begins preparing for the sacrament of Confirmation at her local church. The story positions her at a moment of transition between childhood and adolescence, with all of the emotional and social complexities this change implies. Thus, throughout the film, she questions the faith and religious rituals that surround her, as someone seeking a deeper understanding of her own sense of life and its immaterial aspects.

Rohrwacher does not limit herself to a romanticised view of childhood: her children and teenagers frequently act as sensitive figures who experience the world in a different way to adults, absorbing without understanding the dilemmas and tensions in the surrounding environment. They often seem to be more aware of the contradictions and pains of the world they live in than the adults. In truth, these are the characters that absorb the contradictions, voids and dilemmas offered by institutions with a feeling of disconnection and search for belonging. The title of the film, Heavenly Body, seems to employ this metaphor not just as a search for transcendence, but also for the physicality of human existence. Marta’s body thus becomes a site of constant tension between the purity of childhood and the complexity of adolescence.

The main plot revolves around a group of children attending a preparative course at the church for their Confirmation. However, for our protagonist these religious practices become an empty formal exercise, a series of mechanical gestures that push her away from wanting a genuine experience of faith. This contrast between rituals and the lived experience of the sacred is reflected in the city setting, where religiosity seems to be more connected to tradition and observance of social norms than to spiritual inquiry. The film depicts a city full of vacant land, tunnels and passages, but rather than exoticise it, it reveals it in all its decadence, its chaotic light, wind and rubbish, yet also its brightness. There is a truth in this setting that evokes the truth of the characters that live here.

Rohrwacher constructs a realist world, but her poetic approach generates a feeling of emotional proximity with the protagonist, placing the viewer in a position of doubt and pursuit of knowledge. Heavenly Body is above all a film about the awakening to life’s complexity and a process of questioning reality, subtle and introspective. Alice Rohrwacher, with a meticulous eye for social reality, appears to use documentary and ethnographic elements to investigate the complex interactions between people and their cultural contexts, as well as the tensions between the sacred and the profane, tradition and modernity. She reveals a kind of lost world that, for today’s times, reflects the films of Vittorio De Seta, a world that has always been here and that we recreate through the gaze of the protagonist. To use a word that Alice Rohrwacher herself is fond of, we see, feel and hear the wonders of a world still waiting to be discovered.