Sworn Virgin

Skipping deftly between time frames while keeping her camera close to her protagonist - played with tremulous understatement by the remarkable actress Alba Rohrwacher - Bispuri traces a journey of delicate interior shifts and reversals.

Even though Rohrwacher never quite passes -- she looks too much like Barbra Streisand's Yentl -- the movie is on to a larger point, namely about the fluidity of sexual identity and our universal penchant for self-reinvention

The film obliges viewers to puzzle out the nature of the sworn virgin tradition, and even at the tale's end, it may not be clear. This can only be counted a virtue by those who count obscurity and bafflement as artistic assets.

Although Ms. Rohrwacher captures Mark's uncertain, shifting physicality, the movie doesn't always succeed in getting inside the character's head.

Cutting between present, childhood, and recent past, Bispuri constructs a subtle, richly emotional collage.

The dialogue is affectedly scarce, too scarce to sustain and deepen the story psychologically.

A slow-moving and meditative drama about a young Albanian woman's transgender journey living as a man.

Bispuri's feature debut makes a powerful statement about the suffocation that can come with gender norms, and about the double-edged sword of gender performance.

[Alba Rohrwacher turns] in a magnetic performance, but despite this and the director's skill at creating emotional resonance out of small things, it's not quite enough to stop the story from feeling a little undercooked.

Bispuri's empathetic depiction of rural Albanian traditions explores the globally translatable significance of a woman's right to her own body.

Bispuri and her co-writer Francesca Manieri emphasise the real, using traditional Albanian ceremonies to give a strong sense of place, with cinematographer Vladan Radovic finding good contrast between the cool blues of the village and warmer cityscapes.

In her impressive debut feature, writer/director Bispuri uses this unusual, specific tradition to investigate much broader issues of gender identity ... while also delivering a touching personal portrait of tentative liberation.