A Year of School

Laura Samani's 2026 Italian film is set in 2007. Fred, seventeen, has moved from Sweden to north-east Italy and enrols for her final year of high school, finding herself the only girl in an all-male class. The film's subject is the attention this produces. Fred becomes a focal point, and the relationships she forms with three classmates show the social hierarchy of adolescence and how one person turns into a symbol inside a group. This is Samani's second feature; her first, Small Body, drew festival attention. Here too she keeps place decisive; the climate and the language of the border region are part of the telling. Who it's for: those who like contemporary Italian cinema and adolescent drama. Who it's not for: viewers expecting a definite conclusion; the film closes a school year without resolving the matter.