LA GRADIVA

Marine Atlan’s lush debut brings us to the bright, sun-soaked streets of Naples, where a group of French high schoolers take a field trip with their Latin class during the summer before their graduation. History clashes with the present as the fragile teenagers grapple with their private lives – sex, love, desire, politics, class, and identity – in the haunted ruins of Pompeii.

La Gradiva features an ensemble cast of non-professional actors. Their relationships shift gradually like tectonic plates, mounting to a slow eruption of discoveries and disappointments. Marine Atlan’s camera is observational, enraptured by both the beauty of the Italian streets and the charming, sensitive teenagers who roam throughout them. Her script expertly preserves their adolescence with love and perceptiveness, rendering the impressive ensemble three-dimensional; complete with incongruent dreams and immature beliefs, as they learn about the world around them and themselves.

As the class spends more time in Naples, art and reality begin to converge. They wander through museums, witnessing life and death in every fresco, monument and statue around them. Through their eyes, it becomes apparent that humanity has always wanted to preserve the fragility of life in a story, a fable, or a myth. For millennia, we have succeeded. La Gradiva is every bit about the stories we tell ourselves, as it is about the stories we tell others.  - Mercy Prisca Lam