Laura Samani’s exquisite feature debut – which was recently named Best Picture by the Dublin Film Critics’ Circle at the Dublin International Film Festival – travels on a fairytale quest through Italy’s Friuli-Venezia Giulia region to the French Alpine expanses.

The film begins in 1900 and Agata (the remarkable Celeste Cescutti) is a young pregnant mother who leaves her own blood in the ocean – in accordance with local beliefs – to better protect her pregnancy. Tragically, the ritual proves ineffective. Her daughter was stillborn and – in accordance with contemporary Catholic beliefs – doomed to limbo.

The whispers of a distant church that will allow her child to breathe, just long enough to perform the baptismal rites, push the grieving mother, against her husband’s will, to undertake a perilous journey.

In a series of adventures that play as a creepier married princess, Agata is almost sold as a wet nurse to a wealthy landowner and gets a haircut as payment: “Nothing is for nothing,” says her rescuer.

She meets bandits, cutthroats, and Lynx (played by trans Roman actor Ondina Quadri), a handsome man born girl, who becomes Agata’s traveling companion.

Before the “Italianization” or the standardization of Italy, Samani carefully searched the land of his native northeast. The screenplay, which was co-written with Marco Borromei and Elisa Dondi, uses regional dialect and is based on folk tales of a supposedly miraculous local shrine where unbaptized infants were briefly resuscitated. Celeste Cescutti directs a parochial cast that is largely unprofessional, with a ferocious performance that directs and grounds the film’s realistic magical themes.

Mitja Licen’s lush cinematography selects earthy tones and textures; Chiara Dainese’s faded music and stunning production and costume designs (by Rachele Meliadò and Loredana Buscemi, respectively) create a world where fashionable conceits like gender fluidity and female autonomy coexist seamlessly with the religious superstition.

Don’t miss it.