In the mischievous short, Le Pupille, which earned Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher her first Oscar nomination, a rebellion is growing within Catholic girls’ school in Italy on a Christmas Eve in the midst of World War II.

Young Serafina (Melissa Falasconi) attracts the ire of Sister Fioralba (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s sister), the stern mother superior who rules her boarding school with an iron fist and steely gaze.

As the schoolgirls prepare for the evening’s festivities — stoically re-creating the Nativity — they listen to a radio report that offers somber news from the battlefield. But when Serafina accidentally changes the station, inadvertently filling the hall with the sounds of a love song with a lyric like “kiss me on my little mouth,” the girls erupt into song and dance and, as punishment for their jubilant misbehavior, are rewarded with mouthfuls of soap at the hands of Sister Fioralba.

The project began when Alfonso Cuarón — a four-time Oscar winner for 2018’s Roma (as director and cinematographer) and 2013’s Gravity (director and editor) — reached out to Rohrwacher about a series of short films he was producing.

“He was thinking of producing shorts linked to the end-of-year holidays, and he asked if I wanted to make film about Christmas,” Rohrwacher says. “When he asked me, this story came to my mind — it happened all of a sudden.”

Rohrwacher was inspired by correspondence from Italian novelist and poet Elsa Morante to her friend and fellow writer Goffredo Fofi.

“Just as this film wouldn’t exist if Alfonso had not asked me, it would not exist if Elsa Morante had not sent the letter to Fofi,” explains Rohrwacher, who introduces the letter in the film in the form of a song sung by the young girls. “Morante is a writer I really admire, and I think [her] presence was really important because I wanted her words in the film. I decided to create a song with the letter because the most beautiful way to [perform] the words is to sing them.”

The film was shot during the pandemic, and casting was done via Zoom.

After selecting 17 young actresses, Rohrwacher admits she wasn’t sure who would play her lead. “I said, ‘Everyone can play Serafina — everyone has something [of her] in them, and we will only get it out if we work with them.”

It wasn’t until the last day of rehearsal that Falasconi earned the role, but the selection came with a caveat to the entire cast: “I always told the girls that there is no protagonist. The other girls are all equally important, and I hope you can feel it. We were really careful with everyone who took part in the film, so everyone is equally important.”

Sister Fioralba is the antagonist: “When I was younger, I was afraid of her,” says Rohrwacher of her older sister Alba, who also appeared in the director’s two previous features, 2014’s The Wonders and 2018’s Happy as Lazzaro.

“I immediately thought of my sister for the role of mother superior, maybe because we had never worked together on a very severe character.”

But by the film’s end, the “wicked” Serafina succeeds at brushing off any fear of the cruel nun. When she dares to claim a slice of cake for herself instead of giving it away as a sacrificial offering — and drops bites on the floor for the convent dog to enjoy — the mother superior banishes the girls to their bunks, ultimately offering the cake as payment to a local chimney sweep. Serafina, meanwhile, sneaks away a handful of the cake to share with the other girls. “Destiny works in mysterious ways,” says Rohrwacher, quoting Morante’s letter. “I like that sentence because the girls don’t know they are fulfilling the will of destiny. Fate has it that the cake will be shared with everyone.”

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