Alice Rohrwacher was thinking about cake, as we all do from time to time.

But the Italian filmmaker had her reasons. When Alfonso Cuarón reached out to her about making a Christmastime short film, Rohrwacher immediately thought of a letter by celebrated Italian writer Elsa Morante, centered on a cake that was left at a boarding school and a boy who was too naughty to deserve a slice.

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Rohrwacher decided to set her story at a nun-run boarding school for girls, where a group of precocious girls find themselves “blessed” with a cake on Christmas. The short film, Le Pupille, debuted in Cannes before heading to the Telluride Film Festival, where it will play on Saturday. It takes the magical feelings associated with those classic Christmas movies and filters them through Rohrwacher’s unique perspective.

“I believe Alice is the most interesting filmmaker working today,” says Cuarón, who reached out to her after Disney came to him to discuss producing a series of short films set around Christmas. “She has a unique voice and an eye that captures humanity at its most complex, and she always portrays her characters with immense generosity, blurring the line between reality and poetics.”

Rohrwacher’s work, which includes Lazzaro Felice and The Wonders, both of which won awards at Cannes, often mixes the strife of the real world with sprinkles of magic or mischief. “The intention was to be joyful, to have a joyful story—and yet a serious one,” she tells Vanity Fair through a translator. “We wanted to see joy in the images and the way we were telling the story.” Le Pupille was filmed during the pandemic, bringing its young actors together after a period of unprecedented isolation. “I think the most beautiful thing was to have all these girls getting together. All of a sudden, they could be together after such a long time,” she says.

Rohrwacher says she wanted to take the genre of a Christmas story, which traditionally comes with a moral or lesson at the end, and turn it a bit on its head. At the end of the 37-minute film, which will also play at the Toronto Film Festival and then premiere on Disney+ later this year, the girls reveal that they’re not exactly sure what the moral of this story is. “I like the fact that the moral of this story is a bit bizarre,” she says. “On the one hand, we had a Christmas story, and on the other, we had a lot of fantasy, imagination—my imagination and the viewer’s imagination.”