30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

Summer 1900, Switzerland. Elisabeth, 17, is a novice and is about to take her vows when she hears the news of the sudden and mysterious death of her older sister, Innocente. The new circumstances force her to leave the convent and return home, to the mountains, to take her sister's place in the work on the family farm. The village turns out to be a gloomy, closed, and retrograde context, in which Elisabeth feels suffocated. Driven by an ever stronger yearning for freedom, she will discover the cause of her sister's death but also the call of her love. The price of the rebellion, however, will be abandonment and solitude. Carmen Jaquier, in her debut film, takes the viewer into a whirlpool that delves deeper and deeper into the dogmas, constraints and absurdities of this small world of the recent past, to then free us with a powerful hymn to freedom, to femininity, and to adolescence. The wonderful mountains of Switzerland form the backdrop.

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  Carmen Jaquier

  Carmen Jaquier is a Swiss screenwriter and director, born in 1985. She studied cinema and screenwriting at the Ecole Cantonale d'Art in Lausanne and at the University of Art and Design in Geneva. Her graduation film, The Girls' Grave (2011), won the Pardino d'argento at the Locarno Film Festival. La riviere sous la langue (2015) and Heimatland (2015) were selected at the Locarno Film Festival. Foudre (2022), her first feature film, was screened at numerous festivals, winning various awards.