Italian director Laura Samani’s debut feature, Small Body, was inspired by her hearing about the so-called “feather sanctuaries” scattered across the Alps in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Small Body
Director: Laura Samani

Italian director Laura Samani’s debut feature, Small Body, was inspired by her hearing about the so-called “feather sanctuaries” scattered across the Alps in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The “breathing miracle” they offered was the momentary revivification of stillborn babies. One breath, witnessed by the movement of a feather, was enough for the dead child to be baptised.

At a time of high infant mortality many parents, mainly fathers, would carry the corpses of their stillborn children up the mountains in search of eternal life. An archaeo­logical excavation of a former sanctuary revealed the remnants of 250 infant burials. After the Council of Trent, attitudes towards unbaptised babies changed, and church authorities tried to stamp out the practice; yet a few remote chapels continued clandestinely until the late nineteenth century.

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