A 19th-century girls' boarding school: where prayers meet blood and growing up is a crime.
The misfortunes of Sofia, the exemplary Madalena and Camila, the troubled vacations of girls and boys, a few years later leading to the resolution of some mysteries, form the perfect trilogy by the Countess of Ségur on education, social, religious, and political power. Desire and its oppression, violence and punishment, in short, the terrible loss combined with inevitable growth. Both adults and children will understand that precepts, rules, and prayers can tear nerves and blood apart.
Direction
Botelho turns Ségur's trilogy into claustrophobic visual poetry.
Acting
The ensemble captures childhood cruelty with devastating precision.
Cinematography
Every frame reeks of waxed floors and suppressed screams.
Director
João Botelho
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The Countess of Ségur was a French-Brazilian aristocrat whose children's books were secretly brutal critiques of her own class—Portuguese director Botelho finally takes her seriously as political literature.
Botelho compresses three novels into one film, making the trilogy's structure mirror the girls' entrapment: cyclical, inescapable, deliberately repetitive until it breaks you.
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