Pretty Butterflies

3 August, a poor neighbourhood in Cagliari. Eleven-year-old Cate is woken at three in the morning by a neighbour's shouting. She wants to get out of the house: too many siblings, an overbearing father, a cramped flat. That same day there is a reckoning in the neighbourhood, and Cate spends the longest day of her life with her closest friend Luna, between the city and the sea. Salvatore Mereu adapted the film from a story by the Sardinian writer Sergio Atzeni and shot much of it in Sardinian. The telling runs in Cate's own voice. The film shows the poverty of the neighbourhood, pregnancy at an early age and the pressure on women without turning any of it into a spectacle; the view stays on the child's side throughout. It screened in the Horizons section at the Venice Film Festival in 2012.