Marta, returns to Reggio Calabria, after ten years living with her family in Switzerland.

She has to make her confirmation and between school, the discomfort of a city in disarray, a house without an organization, Marta wanders around with her attentive and inquiring, serious and intelligent, sharp and rebellious gaze.

It is the right age and confirmation must be done because it is the "definitive confirmation of Christian choices," and the young 13-year-old who is discovering her body will meet Santa, the preparer, who is secretly in love with Don Mario, a selfish priest, busy and attracted to the career that draws him away from the Christian life to favor the political one.

Lectures, meetings, dances and songs with manuals such as "They will be witnesses" and "Katekism 2000," a kind of multiple-choice quiz, similar to television, to impart catechism.

In addition, the church has a neon crucifix that needs to be replaced with a figurative, more traditional one, as the locals want it, and it will have to be recovered in Don Mario's old village church, which is always looking for approval.

Santa invites the boys by saying, "stay straight, you are going toward God, you are now Christ's soldiers," and at the same time manages to organize a fierce disappearance for the kittens found in the warehouse by young Martha.

While the bishop with the chaperone arrive in the Jaguar for the confirmation ceremony and remain on the sidelines without establishing any contact with the community, Don Mario fails to bring the figurative crucifix to its destination for the celebration.

Meanwhile, in the adjacent rooms, the boys and girls prepare for confirmation as if for a mundane fashion show.

A disturbing cross-section of more or less well-known realities, the film chronicles the spiritual emptiness and attachment to power by inadequate and irresponsible figures. A look for many anti-clerical but perhaps just secular or simply Christian.

Imperfect but very interesting.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice