‘A Year Of School’ review: A Swedish girl finds her way in an Italian all-male high school

Dir: Laura Samani. Italy/France. 2025. 103 mins

Italian filmmaker Laura Samani deals with the weight of expectation generated by her 2021 debut Small Body by taking things down a notch. Whereas that was a feminist magical realist fable dripping with misty, shape-shifting atmosphere this seems to be a simple teenage coming-of-age story about a Swedish girl who enrolls in an Italian all-male technical high school.

An undertow of niceness and optimism 

Screening in Venice Horizons, A Year Of School may be a challenging sell in the mature arthouse markets reached by Small Body. But if it lacks some of the strangeness and wonder of Samani’s debut, it still works as an engaging comedy-tinged drama of the kind that streaming platforms often snap up.

Under the film’s glossy surface, Samani is once again interested in borders – geo-political, gender, linguistic – and what happens when they are crossed. The location is the director’s hometown, Trieste, an Italian city that was once the main seaport of the Austro-Hungarian empir and has long been something of a shape-shifter itself, with one foot in Western Europe and one in the East. The action is set in 2007, when Slovenia’s accession to the EU’s Schengen area suddenly removed all border checks between Trieste and the former ‘Iron Curtain’ just beyond its eastern suburbs (one of the film’s most soppily tender scenes is set in a disused guard post on the former frontier).

And yet A Year of School wears such metaphors lightly. Adapting a novella written in 1929 by Triestine writer Gianni Stuparich, it is utterly invested in the emotional story at its core; that of a liberated, sensitive young woman, thrown into a den of adolescent males who mask their hangups and uncertainties with casual sexism. When Fred (Stella Wendick) arrives for the first day of autumn term at a school that is male by default rather than statute – because girls, of course, don’t study technical subjects like engineering – she comes up against an aggressive, testosterone- and insecurity-fuelled force-field that knocks her sideways and sends her home, on day one, literally denuded.

It doesn’t help that Fred is foreign as well as a girl: at first, she communicates with teachers and fellow students in English. The three guys she eventually bonds with would make a good boy band: there’s the sensitive poetry-reading one, Antero (Giacomo Covi); the popular yet fragile ladies man, Pasini (Pietro Giustolisi); and the solid, amiable father-bear figure, Mitis (Samuel Volturno). Fred’s gradual transition to Italian and then to Triestine dialect (impenetrable enough for passages to be subtitled for Italian audiences) becomes one of the ways in which this bright, fun-loving young woman manages an identity that will see her pass from sexualized prey to one of the lads. Except, of course, it’s never that simple.

For some of its duration at least, A Year Of School is a young adult rom-com, about a close-knit trio of male friends who all fall in love with the girl who joins their gang – as seen mostly from the girl’s point of view. For all the film’s exploration of sexual politics and gender barriers, for all the emotional pressure that very nearly breaks its female protagonist, there’s an undertow of niceness and optimism, a nostalgia for an age when independence was exciting and the future seemed endless.

Also helping to make Samani’s second feature lighter and more conventional than her debut are the scrawled day-glo opening credits and the intermittent soundtrack of era-appropriate pop by Italian indie bands. Four warm performances by impressive first-time actors draw us in to the story’s core, underscored by photography that uses natural light to illuminate skin and bring out the texture of clothes that follow the story’s arc from early autumn to early summer.