With Un anno di scuola (A Year of School), Laura Samani brings Gianni Stuparich’s novel to the Trieste of 2007, following Fred (Stella Wendick), a Swedish teenager whose arrival disrupts the balance of an all-male class. Between friendship, desire, and the struggle for acceptance, the director weaves the literary text with her own formative experiences, creating a story about the tensions between belonging and individuality.
The film stems from a personal experience. How did your own life shape the emotional and stylistic tone of the film, and how did you work to capture that tension between the desire to belong and the need for individual expression?
It’s true, it’s an autobiographical experience, though not in the most literal sense. I was in a mixed class, I had female friends, but I was the only girl admitted into a trio of boys. In that sense, I felt lucky: it was a kind of privilege, though one that came with a complex and at times uncomfortable position. That’s why I call it a slightly “crooked” kind of power. We were a real gang: always together, speaking the same language, and at some point we even started to look alike, sharing clothes as well. And, of course, I was the one who had to adapt to the boys’ style. I really recognized myself in Giani Stuparich’s novella A Year of School, which I had read in my last year of high school – set, incidentally, in the very same school I attended, the Liceo Dante in Trieste.
How did you connect the dots between your personal story and the book, and arrive at the film?
During lockdown – those eight months when filming on Small Body had been halted (we’d started in mid-February 2020 and had to stop after just ten days) – I was back in my childhood home, with nothing to read but my old high school books. I decided to reread that novella. It felt like destiny; I don’t believe things happen by chance. Even before finishing Small Body I thought: “I want to bring this story to the screen.” I felt it was mine – not only personally, but also ethically and philosophically. For me, films are pretexts: I never imagine the final outcome, I just try to translate into actions whatever inhabits me at that moment. Rereading it, I told myself: “I need to tell what it means to be a girl alone among boys.” And cinema is the only language I know for that.
What did that experience mean to you personally?
To be with them, I had to change – I couldn’t just be “the girl in the group of boys.” You had to crack the cruder jokes, raise the bar, because only then would they stop turning them against you. You build a heavy armor, but sometimes that armor can shatter spectacularly and crush you. I’m not talking about gender or sexual identity, but about yourself as an individual. At that age, everything is formless, and to give shape to things you have to file yourself down, put on a mask. The problem is acceptance: it was like saying, “I won’t wear the dress – because if I do, I’m ‘the girl.’ I’ll wear pants, I’ll dress like the boys.”
Why did you choose to set the story within the confined space of a classroom?
The classroom is a small community within the small world of school. Another key element is that it’s the last year of high school – the last year when you still have functional enemies: adults, meaning parents, teachers, the “outside” itself. And within nine months—the span of that final school year – you become an adult yourself.
Trieste, September 2007. Fred (Stella Wendick), a bold and exuberant seventeen-year-old from Sweden, arrives in the city for her final year of high school at a technical institute. The only girl in a class of boys, she immediately draws everyone’s attention, especially that ...
How did you work with the lead actors?
Pietro Giustolisi, who plays Pasini, is the oldest – 26 years old – but there was no emotional gap, no forced memory work. Samuel Volturno, who plays Mitis, has just graduated, and Giacomo Covi plays Antero. We held a very careful yet wide-reaching casting, going into every high school in Friuli Venezia Giulia. None of the three boys had previous acting experience; only Stella Wendick (Fred) studied at a performing arts high school in Stockholm. The four were chosen based on their aura. They resemble the characters they play, but also grew into them during the process – getting to know the story and the roles without reading the script until much later. We spent time together, talking, having countless coffees and beers, slowly becoming a gang. We first worked with the three boys, creating their bond, and only later added her – when the dynamic was already in place, mirroring the relationships we wanted to portray.
A Year of School is based on Stuparich’s novella, but relocates the story to Trieste in 2007. How did you and Elisa Dondi approach the adaptation? Which elements did you preserve, transform, or reinvent to make it resonate today?
The first reason I updated the setting was purely selfish: after Small Body I didn’t want to shoot another film with carriages, horses, and long skirts. Maybe I’ll go back to that one day, but not immediately. One option was to set it in 2024. But, influenced by the time when I first read the novella, I chose 2007–2008, the year I graduated. What I pictured while reading were low-rise jeans and cell phones without cameras. And then I realized more consciously that 2007 had real weight: that year Slovenia joined the Schengen area, which was hugely significant for Trieste, a border city. There was this radiant idea of a “united Europe.” 2007 was also the last year before Facebook arrived in Italy; being 18 or 19 then was truly different from today. Elisa and I share an imaginative world, and the work was tough because A Year of School is a perfect novella. Though written in the 20th century, it still has 19th-century qualities: deep interiority, introspection, and many narrative gaps. Our job was to build bridges. We stayed very faithful to the emotions and interpersonal dynamics, but with one huge difference. The novella begins by saying that Antero, Pasini, and Mitis had belonged together until the arrival of Edda (as she’s called there) pulled them apart. I thought: “No, that’s where the film begins.” The big shift was portraying three characters trying for a year to be four, with all the dynamics that entails. In the novella, they part ways quickly, each developing a personal, sometimes secret, bond with the girl. In the end, no adaptation is ever “pure.” Now the story no longer belongs to the writer or the director – it belongs to whoever reads it, sees it, and lives it.
Trieste is not just a backdrop, but a narrative presence that interacts with the characters.
I’m from Trieste, so my gaze was shaped by the city – which in recent years has undergone rapid change in its urban image. In searching my memory for places that could bring back what I remembered, I found the right location, both perfect and functional for the story.
