Full of Grace

Roberto Bueso's 2022 Spanish film is set at a boarding school in the summer of 1994. Sister Marina is not much given to rules; she is sent to El Parral, a boys' boarding school under threat of closure, where the pupils greet her with a run of pranks. Marina realises that most of these boys have no family and that nobody will come for them all summer. Rather than opening the relation between religion and education to criticism, the film describes abandoned children holding on to one another and to an adult. The tone is light and the humour plentiful, while the emotional passages proceed along familiar lines. Carmen Machi balances the character between hardness and tenderness. Period music and nineties detail make up its texture. Who it's for: viewers who like family comedy and Spanish cinema. Who it's not for: anyone expecting the subject to be treated seriously; the film keeps its tone light.