A Chiara (Italy) (4/24)

A Chiara is the third installment of American/Italian director Jonas Carpignano’s Calabrian trilogy. (For those of you who never bothered to take Italian geography in high school, Calabria is the toe-region of the boot-shaped Italy that is kicking the Sicilian football). While it’s the third in a trilogy of films set in the same small town, they are not directly connected, so you can hop in to this one without watching Mediterranea or A Ciambra. This drama, which debuted at Cannes 2021 but wasn’t released in the US for a year, follows Chiara, a 15-year-old girl who begins to investigate her family’s history after her father mysteriously disappears the night of her sister’s birthday party. What secrets lie in her family tree, and how will they affect her life? She’s determined to find out in a way that only a headstrong teenage girl can do.