02/09/2025 - VENICE 2025: The Italian director tells us about her new film, which centres on a 19-year-old Swedish girl who finds herself being the only girl in an all-boys classroom

Selected in the competition of the Orizzonti section at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, A Year of School [+see also:
film review
interview: Laura Samani
film profile] by Laura Samani talks about a 19-year-old Swedish girl, Fred (Stella Wendick) who arrives in Trieste in 2007 to attend the last year of school in a technical institute and finds herself being the only girl in an all-boys classroom. Her arrival upsets in particular a trio of mates, putting their friendship to the test. Samani debuted with Small Body [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laura Samani
film profile] in Cannes’s Critics’ Week in 2021, winning over 40 awards around the world. Cineuropa met her on the occasion of a roundtable discussion with the Italian press on the Lido.

In her director’s notes, Laura Samani talked about an autobiographical aspect of the film. “More than autobiographical, the dynamic in this story is metanarrative”, Samani highlights. “Because the film is very freely based on the homonymous novel by Gianni Stuparich, it is set in the Dante school in Trieste, which I myself attended. It was on these very benches that I read the book when I was the age of the characters. I had the opportunity to re-read it during the first lockdown, because I was at my parents’ house and had my books from high school. I thought, “we haven’t even finished Small Body yet and I’ve already understood that I want to make another film!”

Small Body and A Year of School are very different films, but there is a thread connecting them, that of a young woman’s identification, who finds her identity in a difficult society. Samani thinks that she is “still completely inside the process and I haven’t thought about this enough yet. After Small Body – a very important film for me but which was also very painful to make – I needed some levity. The best way has been to work with teenagers, young men and a young woman, having fun together, and probably wondering about things that hadn’t yet been answered on Small Body. There is certainly solitude in part of the film, and a question of identity.”

Samani managed to create an atmosphere of great complicity and spontaneity between the young actors in the film. “I like working with people I like. It seems to be a tautology but you often work with someone who’s good. For me, it matters first and foremost that they be kindred spirits. With Davide Zurlo, the casting director, and his assistant Alejandro Bonn, who then became the kid’s acting coach, we made it so that they would become a real team off set. They really are friends in reality, they support each other because it is their first film. We first worked with the trio of boys, gradually approaching the set and thinking about the themes of the film. Reading the script came later. Stella was inserted later, when the trio was already quite compact and also to create a collective memory to bring to set”.

Some choices are different from the book on which the film is based, as well as from the 1977 TV miniseries directed by Franco Giraldi, starting with the 2008 setting and the Swedish protagonist, which creates a language barrier. “It’s set in 2007 because it’s the year I graduated, therefore my 19th year is located in that period. Then, with co-writer Elisa Dondi, we realised that it was the last year before the arrival of social media in Italy, the entry of Slovenia in Schengen, when we had big dreams about a Europe perhaps a little different than today. In Stuparich’s story, the Edda protagonist is called “the Viennese”, but her only difference is her gender. She’s a woman who wants to study. In our film, we chose a Swedish girl above all because there is an exotic charm in telling a group of males: the Swede has arrived. Regarding the language, I’d say that men and women don’t speak the same language and capturing this barrier was immediate, almost banal. And then, language in the film comes to be used as a fence, as an instrument of power over the other”.

(Translated from Italian)