“ It’s not joyful being a child,” cries four-year-old Ponette (Victoire Thivisol), the infant heroine of Jacques Doillon’s miraculous film about childhood grief. After her mother perishes in a car accident, and her father becomes inconsolable from the loss, Ponette is cast into spiritual and emotional isolation, hoping beyond hope that her parent will return. Unable to articulate her sorrow, Ponette is thrown deeper into turmoil by the irreconcilable degrees of literalism with which her family, teachers, and peers interpret Holy Scripture seemingly the only way they can think to cure her despair. Told that her Mother will appear with prayer, the girl delays her recovery in the false hope of a corporeal reunion, and so her solace comes only in sleep a retreat from the world, and from truth.