Q&A with Chiara Bellosi on June 10

A young girl’s coming-of-age unfolds in moving, surprising ways in Chiara Bellosi’s second fiction feature. Benedetta (Gaia Di Pietro) is a withdrawn, heavyset teenager whose mundane life in a rural area outside Rome stands at odds with her inner world. But when a fairground pops up near her family’s home, she winds up befriending Amanda (Andrea Carpenzano), a self-determined trans woman who works there (among other gigs), inaugurating a transformative friendship for both. Through Amanda, Benedetta glimpses a freer life beyond the horizon of her immediate surroundings, and she finds herself wandering down a path toward adulthood. A work of immense sensitivity and casual, low-key poetry, Swing Ride is a tale of self-actualization for today.