Un anno di scuola (2025) by Laura Samani
IT / FR | 2025 | 102 min | Coming-of-Age Drama
When Being Accepted Means Deciding How Much of Yourself to Change
Trieste, 2007. Swedish teenager Fred Sjöberg arrives with her father and enters the final year of a technical high school where she is the only girl in an otherwise all-male class. Her presence immediately changes the social balance, particularly between lifelong friends Antero, Pasini and Mitis.
Fred wants to become part of their group rather than remain the girl standing outside it. But friendship becomes complicated by attraction: each boy develops feelings for her, while Fred discovers that joining their world increasingly requires adapting how she dresses, communicates and expresses her own desires.
➡️ Movie Insight: Un anno di scuola turns adolescent belonging into a negotiation between acceptance and individuality. Fred wants friendship without having to become less herself in order to receive it. Growing up means discovering that fitting in and being free to be yourself are not always the same thing.
Why This Movie Matters Right Now: When Belonging Comes With Unwritten Rules
Fred's situation takes place in 2007, but its central tension extends well beyond that period. Entering an established social group often means learning its language, behavior and codes—but those adaptations become more complicated when expectations are shaped by gender.
Laura Samani makes that tension physical. As Fred becomes closer to the boys, her appearance changes: the more feminine clothes visible when she first arrives give way to cargo trousers and sweaters that help her visually become part of the group. Samani describes this as both strategic adaptation and a kind of disguise, reflecting the different ways male and female bodies are socially perceived.
➡️ Why It Matters: Belonging can create connection while simultaneously creating pressure to conform. That pressure becomes unequal when one person must change more than everyone else to remain accepted. Fred's experience asks whether inclusion is meaningful when individuality becomes the price of admission.
Should You Watch It?: A Natural Coming-of-Age Drama About Friendship, Desire and Identity
Un anno di scuola is suited to viewers who prefer coming-of-age cinema built from recognizable adolescent experiences rather than dramatic plot mechanisms. Friendship, attraction, awkwardness, jealousy, school and the desire to fit in gradually expose deeper tensions between Fred and the boys.
The young cast strengthens that naturalism. Stella Wendick plays Fred alongside Giacomo Covi as Antero, Pietro Giustolisi as Pasini and Samuel Volturno as Mitis, creating a central group whose shifting friendships carry the story.
➡️ Viewing Recommendation: Watch it for a coming-of-age story where friendship and attraction cannot easily be separated. Fred's outsider position makes familiar teenage experiences look different. What begins as the desire to join a group gradually becomes a question of how much anyone should change in order to belong.
Why Everyone Is Talking About It: A Young Cast Brings New Energy to Venice
Un anno di scuola premiered in the Orizzonti competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, establishing Laura Samani's second feature on a major international stage. The film subsequently travelled internationally, while its young performers became an important part of its recognition.
The casting process deliberately searched among young people in Trieste, helping the friendship between the boys develop beyond the screen. At Venice, Giacomo Covi won the Orizzonti Award for Best Actor, while Samani also received additional recognition around the festival for her direction.
➡️ Viral Potential: A young cast gives the film the spontaneity its adolescent world requires. Venice recognition helped transform a specifically Triestine coming-of-age story into an international discovery. Its tensions around friendship, attraction and fitting in remain immediately recognizable beyond its setting.
Why Un anno di scuola Stands Out: Fred Wants Friendship and Desire at the Same Time
Fred's conflict is more complicated than simply being the only girl among boys. She wants to belong to the group as an equal while also allowing herself to experience attraction and desire.
The boys have greater freedom to combine those two things. For Fred, expressing desire risks changing her position within the friendship group. Samani identifies this contradiction as central to the story: Fred wants both love and equal membership, yet the social dynamics around her make those desires difficult to reconcile.
➡️ Cinema Insight: The film makes belonging complicated by asking whether Fred can participate without becoming what the group expects. Friendship promises equality while attraction exposes unequal rules underneath it. Her coming of age becomes a struggle to remain recognizable to herself.
Movie Trend: Coming-of-Age Drama — When Being the Only Girl Changes the Rules of Belonging
Coming-of-age cinema frequently follows outsiders attempting to enter established social groups. Un anno di scuola gives that familiar structure a gender dimension by making Fred the only girl inside an overwhelmingly male environment.
Her arrival also destabilizes a friendship that existed long before she appeared. Antero, Pasini and Mitis each desire her while Fred wants to belong to all three, creating a conflict in which friendship, attraction and identity continually overlap.
Trend Formula:new country → outsider → male friendship group → desire to belong → attraction → gender expectations → pressure to adapt → conflict → self-definition
➡️ Movie Trend: Fred enters the group wanting to become one of them. Attraction changes the rules under which that belonging operates. The coming-of-age journey becomes a test of whether acceptance can coexist with individuality.
Broad Trend: Freedom to Be Yourself — When Belonging Requires Resisting Pressure to Adapt to Gender Expectations
Belonging is powerful because social groups provide friendship, identity and security. But belonging becomes more complicated when acceptance depends on suppressing behaviors, desires or identities that challenge the group's expectations.
Fred experiences that contradiction through gender. She gradually adopts aspects of the boys' clothing, language and behavior as she enters their world, while her own desires threaten the position she has worked to establish. Samani has described the underlying asymmetry directly: the boys can express themselves freely, while Fred's desires become disruptive because she occupies a different gender position inside the group.
Broad Trend Formula:desire to belong → social expectations → pressure to adapt → loss of individuality → resistance → self-expression → freedom to be yourself
➡️ Broad Trend: Belonging should not require erasing the differences that make someone an individual. Gender expectations can create invisible rules around which behaviors are accepted and which become threatening. Freedom to be yourself means finding connection without surrendering identity in exchange for acceptance.
Why Coming-of-Age Dramas About Belonging Are Popular: Adolescence Makes Conformity Impossible to Ignore
Adolescence intensifies the tension between individuality and social acceptance. Friendship groups become important sources of identity at precisely the moment young people are beginning to determine who they want to become.
Un anno di scuola adds another layer by placing Fred inside a culture and language that are not originally hers. She must decode Italian adolescence, an established male friendship group and gender expectations simultaneously, making adaptation both necessary and potentially limiting.
➡️ Audience Motivation: Coming-of-age stories revisit the period when belonging can feel essential to identity. They allow audiences to recognize the compromises made to gain friendship, attraction and acceptance. Fred's experience asks where healthy adaptation ends and losing part of yourself begins.
Viewer Profile: Life Reflectors - Viewers Choosing Coming-of-Age Stories About Identity, Friendship and Finding a Place Without Losing Yourself
Life Reflectors are attracted to films that transform ordinary transitions into questions about identity. They value recognizable relationships, imperfect friendships and characters whose development comes through experience rather than dramatic revelation.
Un anno di scuola offers that audience a particularly layered adolescent environment. Fred is simultaneously foreigner, newcomer, friend, object of desire and young woman trying to define herself independently of how the boys perceive her.
Audience Dimension | Profile |
Core Audience | Coming-of-age, youth drama and European cinema audiences |
Age Group | Young adult and adult viewers |
Lifestyle | Viewers interested in identity, relationships, equality and social dynamics |
Cinema Taste | Character-driven drama, European cinema and realistic coming-of-age stories |
Streaming Behavior | Discovers films through festivals, specialty platforms and recommendations |
Discovery Mindset | Looks for recognizable life experiences viewed through distinctive cultural perspectives |
➡️ Audience Insight: Life Reflectors recognize that growing up involves negotiating between social acceptance and individuality. Fred's circumstances are specific, but the pressure to adapt in order to belong is widely recognizable. The film turns that tension into a larger question about maintaining identity inside relationships.
What This Movie Means for the Industry: Period Stories Can Examine Social Progress Without Going Far Into the Past
Setting the film in 2007 gives Samani an unusual form of recent-period cinema. It captures the final years before social media fundamentally altered teenage interaction in Italy, while also placing the story around Slovenia's entry into the Schengen Area—a moment associated with changing borders and optimism about a more open Europe.
That setting also creates useful distance from contemporary debates around gender. The film can ask what has changed since 2007 while allowing audiences to recognize dynamics that have persisted.
➡️ Industry Insight: Recent history can reveal social change as effectively as distant period cinema. Moving a 1929 story into 2007 allows old gender tensions to be tested against a supposedly more modern generation. The persistence of those tensions becomes part of the adaptation's contemporary relevance.
Creative Analysis: Turning the Desire to Belong Into a Fight to Remain Yourself
Laura Samani adapts Giani Stuparich's 1929 story by relocating its dynamics to the generation she herself belonged to. Fred becomes Swedish, the setting becomes 2007 Trieste and the cultural difference between her and the boys adds another boundary alongside gender.
The adaptation therefore asks whether nearly a century of social change has altered the central dilemma: what happens when a young woman wants to participate in a male world without allowing that world to determine who she can be?
Storytelling: Making Friendship and Desire Compete
Fred wants two things that appear compatible: friendship with the boys and the freedom to pursue her own desires. The story gradually reveals that the social environment does not allow those ambitions to coexist easily.
That creates the central tension. Every step closer to one member of the group potentially changes her relationship with the others, making desire something capable of destabilizing belonging.
Direction: Shifting the Gaze From the Boys to Fred
Samani structures perspective as part of the film's meaning. The story initially positions audiences closer to the boys looking at Fred, before gradually shifting toward Fred's perspective and revealing how differently she experiences the same social environment.
That transition matters because Fred begins as an object of curiosity before becoming the person through whom the limitations of the group are understood.
Performances: Making Friendship Feel Lived-In
Samani and her casting team developed the trio before fully integrating Stella Wendick into their dynamic. Covi, Giustolisi and Volturno built a friendship around their first major film experience, creating an established male group into which Wendick's Fred could genuinely feel like a newcomer.
That process mirrors the story itself. Fred enters an existing relationship rather than a collection of individual characters waiting for her arrival.
Visual Style: Watching Fred Gradually Change
Cinematographer Inès Tabarin photographs Fred's transition through a world where bodies and appearance carry social meaning, while Loredana Buscemi's costumes become particularly important to the character's adaptation.
Fred's changing clothes visualize the pressure to belong. Becoming visually closer to the boys helps her enter the group, but it also raises the question of whether adaptation is voluntary self-expression or a strategy for avoiding unwanted attention.
Themes: Freedom Means Being Able to Want What You Want
The deepest gender tension is not simply that Fred is surrounded by boys. It is that their desires are treated differently from hers.
Samani's director statement describes a social asymmetry in which male action is normalized while female desire can become threatening. Fred therefore has to choose between expressing what she wants and protecting her place inside the group.
What Makes It Different: Updating a 1929 Story Without Removing Its Original Conflict
Giani Stuparich's source story was written in 1929 and set much earlier, yet Samani does not move it into the contemporary smartphone era. Instead, she selects 2007—the year she finished school herself and a moment immediately before social media transformed teenage interaction.
That decision creates an intriguing test. If a story about gender, friendship and belonging can move across generations while retaining its central tension, the persistence of that tension becomes part of what the adaptation is saying.
➡️ Creative Insight: Un anno di scuola uses adaptation to measure how much social expectations have changed across generations. Fred appears freer than the young woman imagined in the original story, yet freedom remains conditional inside her social group. Her real transformation comes from recognizing the difference between adapting to others and surrendering herself.
If You Liked Un anno di scuola (2025): Identity, Belonging and the Freedom to Be Yourself
My Dearest Señorita (2026) by Fernando González Molina: When Self-Discovery Challenges the Identity Others Expect
A young woman raised within a traditional environment discovers she is intersex, beginning a journey through identity, relationships and the freedom to determine her own life.
➡️ Why It Connects: Both films explore the tension between personal identity and expectations created by the surrounding social world. Belonging becomes complicated when acceptance depends on fitting established ideas about gender. Freedom begins with claiming the right to define yourself.
Flat Girls (2025) by Jirassaya Wongsutin: When Friendship, Love and Social Differences Complicate Growing Up
Two teenage girls who have grown up together confront friendship, attraction, class differences and approaching adulthood when circumstances threaten to separate their lives.
➡️ Why It Connects: Both films place young women inside relationships that simultaneously provide belonging and create pressure. Friendship becomes more complicated as desire, identity and social differences emerge. Growing up means discovering how to preserve individuality while relationships around them change.
Young Hearts (2024) by Anthony Schatteman: When First Love Requires the Freedom to Accept Who You Are
Fourteen-year-old Elias develops feelings for his new neighbor Alexander but struggles between what he feels and the social expectations surrounding him.
➡️ Why It Connects: Both films connect adolescence with the pressure to reconcile personal desire and social expectations. Belonging feels safer when difference remains hidden, but that safety restricts individual freedom. Growing up means finding the confidence to accept feelings that do not necessarily conform to what others expect.
➡️ If You Liked Insight: These films explore adolescence and early adulthood as periods when belonging can collide with individuality. Social expectations create pressure to become easier for others to accept. Freedom emerges when connection no longer requires hiding or reshaping essential parts of identity.
Final Verdict: Belonging Without Becoming Someone Else
Un anno di scuola transforms an apparently familiar school-year story into a sharper examination of the compromises hidden inside belonging. Fred's arrival destabilizes the boys' friendship, but their world also changes Fred as she learns which versions of herself receive acceptance and which create resistance.
The gender dimension gives that coming-of-age journey broader significance. Fred's challenge is not simply finding friends or navigating attraction; it is discovering whether she can participate fully in relationships without allowing other people's expectations to define the limits of her identity.
➡️ Final Verdict: Fred wants to belong without surrendering the freedom to define herself. The group offers friendship while quietly demanding adaptation. Un anno di scuola finds its coming-of-age turning point in recognizing that acceptance and self-erasure are not the same thing.
Quick Facts: The Only Girl in an All-Male Class Discovers That Belonging Can Come With a Price
Director | Laura Samani |
Screenplay | Laura Samani / Elisa Dondi |
Based On | Un anno di scuola by Giani Stuparich |
Lead Cast | Stella Wendick / Giacomo Covi / Pietro Giustolisi / Samuel Volturno |
Countries | Italy / France |
Year | 2025 |
Runtime | 102 min |
Genre | Coming-of-Age Drama |
Languages | Italian / English / Swedish |
Cinematography | Inès Tabarin |
Editing | Chiara Dainese |
Production Design | Federica Bologna |
Costume Design | Loredana Buscemi |
Production | Nefertiti Film with Rai Cinema / Tomsa Films / ARTE France Cinéma |
Italian Distribution | Lucky Red |
International Distribution | Rai Cinema International Distribution |
Festival Premiere | Venice Film Festival 2025 — Orizzonti |
Venice Recognition | Orizzonti Award for Best Actor — Giacomo Covi |
Movie Trend | Coming-of-Age Drama — When Being the Only Girl Changes the Rules of Belonging |
Broad Trend | Freedom to Be Yourself — When Belonging Requires Resisting Pressure to Adapt to Gender Expectations |
Viewer Profile | Life Reflectors |
Central Character | Fred Sjöberg |
Core Conflict | Fred wants to join three male friends as an equal while attraction and gender expectations increasingly threaten her place in the group |
Creative Hook | A 1929 coming-of-age story relocated to pre-social-media Trieste in 2007 |
Core Themes | Belonging / individuality / gender expectations / friendship / desire / identity / freedom |
Why Watch | A natural coming-of-age drama examining how the desire to belong can collide with the freedom to remain yourself |
Final Insights: Freedom Means Belonging Without Losing Individuality
The freedom to be yourself becomes most difficult when individuality threatens belonging. Social groups create powerful incentives to adapt, particularly during adolescence when friendship and acceptance can feel fundamental to identity. Gender expectations add another layer by determining which forms of behavior, appearance and desire are considered acceptable.
Un anno di scuola shows why greater social freedom does not automatically eliminate those invisible pressures. Fred can enter the classroom, join the boys and pursue her desires, but equality also depends on whether she can do those things without paying a different social price.
➡️ Final Insight: Freedom is incomplete when acceptance depends on becoming what others expect. Belonging becomes meaningful when difference can exist inside the group rather than being erased by it. Un anno di scuola turns one school year into a larger story about protecting individuality while searching for connection.
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