A new short film from Alice Rohrwach­er is get­ting a release through Disney+

When peo­ple think about Dis­ney, the first things leap­ing to mind tend to be princess­es, super­heroes, or Jedi knights. But a cor­po­rate behe­moth with such deep pock­ets can also afford to ven­ture out beyond the safe realm of fran­chis­ing to throw some mon­ey around where it goes a lit­tle fur­ther, and now they’re bring­ing a bit of their largesse to the low­er-pro­file inter­na­tion­al market.

The Ital­ian-made short film Le Pupille will be avail­able through Dis­ney+ start­ing 16 Decem­ber, an unlike­ly if wide­ly acces­si­ble home for the lat­est work from art­house favorite Alice Rohrwach­er. Pho­tographed with a com­bi­na­tion of 16mm and 35mm for­mats, the 37-minute homage to Zero for Con­duct and oth­er unruly-child clas­sics may seem an odd fit for the Mouse’s stream­ing plat­form, but the sea­son­al angle will nonethe­less place it along­side the rest of their Yule­tide-themed content.

Le Pupille was con­ceived as part of a series of Christ­mas­time shorts com­mis­sioned by Dis­ney and pro­duced through Alfon­so Cuarón, a fan of Rohrwacher’s who fig­ured that her expe­ri­ence work­ing with chil­dren would make her an ide­al fit for the kid­die-beloved stu­dio. And while her project does indeed fea­ture hol­i­day mer­ri­ment and apple-cheeked young­sters, it’s also an irrev­er­ent per­spec­tive on the empti­ness of con­ven­tion­al Chris­t­ian pieties.

The short — adapt­ed from a let­ter penned by the cel­e­brat­ed writer Elsa Morante — joins a gag­gle of stu­dents over a lone­ly Christ­mas they’ve all got no choice but to spend at their board­ing school. As they stage their own lit­tle nativ­i­ty play, they also intro­duce a bit of anar­chy to the stuffy envi­ron­ment of grown-up author­i­ty, remind­ing us all of the child­like spir­it that’s sup­posed to ani­mate a hol­i­day root­ed in belief.

For par­ents try­ing to get their off­spring hooked on cin­e­ma out­side the Eng­lish lan­guage, Rohrwacher’s newest is an ear­ly gift, proof that youth-friend­ly film­mak­ing can exist out­side the bright, loud, excitable reg­is­ter of G‑rated US exports. For some, it could be their first time see­ing some­thing shot on ana­log film — and isn’t cre­at­ing mem­o­ries to be cher­ished for the rest of a child’s life what Christ­mas is real­ly about?