Thirteen-year-old Marta moves from Switzerland to a small Calabrian town along with her mother and sister. There, she is sent to the local church to prepare for her Catholic confirmation and hopefully make new friends. But the religion she finds there—and how it dominates people’s lives—is strange.

Celestial blues are speckled with red and religious icons flicker and fall in Alice Rohrwacher’s first feature. With cinematography by Hélène Louvart, the filmmaker braids the discoveries of girlhood into towering questions of faith to create a coming-of-age tale that is at once lived-in and divine.