Sworn Virgin

Notions of gender, culture and sexuality potently swirl throughout Laura Bispuri’s visually splendid and moving debut film. Mark, who appears male in name only, arrives in Italy at the doorstep of his sister Lila, who reluctantly lets him inside. Through a series of carefully orchestrated flashbacks, Mark’s story is revealed. Born with the name Hana, but growing up extremely tomboyish in an Albanian mountain village where very traditional notions of womanhood persist, she agrees to forswear her identity and live and work as a man, following local custom. Having relocated to Italy, a place where greater gender fluidity is possible, Hana finds herself able to explore who she really is. Bispuri, adapting an acclaimed novel by Elvira Dones, sensitively charts Hana’s reacquaintance with her own body and mind, particularly through trips to a local pool where she is confronted by physiques of all kinds in various stages of undress. Her relationship with Lila undergoes a similar recalibration as there is some fraught family history not wholly related to Hana’s gender switch. Alba Rohrwacher (also seen in The Wonders), swiftly becoming one of Italian cinema’s brightest lights, masterfully conveys the conflicting feelings, sexual curiosity and emotional resourcefulness of the main character while Bispuri, who spent over three years working on the film, vividly conveys her protagonist’s reabsorption into the world and her very self. —Rod Armstrong