No film focused on a middle-class White girl and a working-class Black woman can entirely avoid considerations of class and race. Nor can a film that switches between Europe and Africa fail to touch on neo-colonialism. Such questions seep into Marie Amachoukeli’s charming coming-of-age drama Àma Gloria even as she delves deeply into child psychology and the eternal struggle of the young to grapple with complexity. Finally, though, this is a heart-rending film about requited love, pure but far from simple; a love that must relinquish to fulfil itself.

When six-year-old Cléo ((Louise Mauroy-Panzani) learns that her beloved nanny Gloria (Ilça Moreno Zego), must return home to Cape Verde, her tiny world collapses. Her father Arnaud (Arnaud Rebotini), though attentive and caring, is hard-working and often absent so she has come to rely on the care, comfort, security, friendship and advice offered by her older soulmate. Having lost her own mother to cancer, Cléo feels bereft when Gloria announces that she must put her own family first following the sudden death of her own mother. She persuades her father to ease the pain of separation, experienced by the child and her nanny with equal intensity, by granting her one last summer with Gloria in Africa.

During that one emotionally turbulent visit, Cléo comes of age and Gloria is restored to herself.  It is in Cape Verde that Cléo first learns about indifference and hostility, from Gloria’s pregnant daughter Fernanda (Abnara Gomes Varela) and younger son César (Fredy Gomes Tavares) respectively: Nanda is otherwise engaged while sullen César resents Gloria and is initially cold toward Cléo. It is there too, while coming to terms with Gloria’s wider loyalties and surrounded as she is by Africans, that this innocent, lively girl first learns not only about the necessity of letting go but also about white privilege and, we hope, her own infantile sense of entitlement. Àma Gloria is a love story with a difference.

Once the scene has shifted to Gloria’s world, we see what drew this indomitable woman to Paris and Europe. She has been sending her hard-earned money home, is building a resort hotel, and she cares for her family as unselfishly as she had previously cared for her young charge. Tensions surface as Gloria follows her own path and Cléo becomes jealous of her divided attention. When Gloria sings a song she used to share with Cléo to her own family, the wounded girl yelps, ‘That’s my song.’ Gloria replies, firmly but fairly, ‘Songs belong to everyone.’ The symbolism is clear. Gloria must move on and so must Cléo.

In Cape Verde, Gloria comes alive for us. We see her with her lover, supervising construction of her hotel, assisting her daughter. Cléo becomes ever more reliant on César’s company and, perhaps drawn to his anger like a moth to a flame, increasingly intrudes on the rumbustious games of his band of young bulls. She is shunned at first but, as César softens and her tomboy bravery impresses, she is welcomed into the fold. She is becoming Cléo-without-Gloria by diving feet first into life.

The palpable chemistry between Mauroy-Panzani’s and Ilça Moreno Zego anchors the film in a vivid natural realism and, although just 80 minutes long, it allows its protagonists time aplenty to reveal themselves. The emotional complexity and volatility of the film’s later stages wouldn’t move us so powerfully if they weren’t grounded in the exquisite early scenes that establish the central relationship: Cléo giggling impishly as she learns to see the world through different eyes in an optician’s, her face lighting up spontaneously when she spots Gloria at her school’s gates, Gloria’s wreathed in tender smiles as she bathes her charge or marked with tears as they part at an airport. The film values life’s small precious moments as much as it values children.

While directors must always take huge credit for the performances they coax out of child actors, Louise Mauroy-Panzani’s range is breathtaking. Not since Ana Torrent’s imperishable performances in Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive and Carlos Saura’s Cría Cuervos has one so young risen to such heights. In one unforgettable scene when Cléo’s jealousy takes a murderous turn, she plays against ‘cute kid’ type to deliver a hauntingly chilling moment and its aftermath with a subtlety that would be the envy of older, more experienced actors.

Amachoukeli handles the confusing, often dangerous challenges and vulnerabilities of growing up with rare delicacy and perspicacity. She was herself raised by a Portuguese nanny (to whom the film is dedicated, as Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is to his) and the film’s autobiographical underpinnings intensify its completely convincing psychological veracity. That Àma Gloria also sparkles with unmediated freshness and vivacity owes much to this being Amachoukeli’s solo directorial debut and a first outing for its two equally formidable leads.

The charged interpersonal relations and chaotic growing pains the film delineates are handled with such dexterity that we come to feel as Cléo feels and see as she sees. This child’s-eye perspective, with its echoes of producer Céline Sciamma’s own Petite Maman, might easily have skewed the film disastrously in a Eurocentric direction and robbed Gloria and Africans of agency. Amachoukeli nimbly sidesteps that danger by adopting a daring twin-track formal strategy. On one hand, she complements cinematographer Inès Tabarin’s intimate close-ups with impressionistic animated sequences, redolent of illustrated children’s books, to heighten the focus on Cléo’s subjectivity: on the other hand, she leans on documentary’s truth claims to show Cape Verdean life as it is lived, with its reliance on fishing, money earned in the overdeveloped world and the tainted gold of mass tourism.

A potent palimpsest or pentimento pulses beneath the surface of Àma Gloria that contains a further layer of meaning. When Gloria was born, Cape Verde laboured under the colonial domination that was successfully resisted by Amilcar Cabral’s African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Cabral, who was voted the second greatest leader in the world in a poll conducted by BBC in 2020, believed in cinema’s capacity to change the world. Like Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara and countless others, he was assassinated. Not, though, before he’d initiated a programme of cinematic resistance that dovetailed with the armed struggle that, in turn, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Portuguese people to drive Estadol Novo out of Africa and Portugal.

A vital component of the Third Cinema movement, Cape Verde’s decolonising cinema was nurtured in its infancy by Santiago Álverez, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Maker and Jean Rouch – who provided training and equipment. Mobile cinemas reminiscent of Dziga Vertov and Aleksandr Medvedkin’s agit-prop cine-trains, toured the bush to educate and prepare people for independence. Cabral didn’t live to see Cape Verde and other former Portuguese colonies achieve liberation, but he bequeathed a cinematic legacy that lives on in Àma Gloria.

Amachoukeli’s reliving or re-rendering of her own girlhood rightly takes centre stage in the film, but these echoes of the past reverberate in the rites of passage demarcated and the steady steps both Cléo and Gloria take toward independence. If it is troubling that Gloria’s voice is somewhat muted, it is nonetheless as rare as it is refreshing to see a film set in Africa that allows Africans any kind of agency. Above all, though, this is a sensitive, soulful tear-jerker about one fragile little heart beating in tune with a warm motherly African one. Àma Gloria treats childhood, motherhood, love and mutual respect with the respect they deserve. It is simultaneously heart-breaking and heart-warming. It is full of heart.

Àma Gloria is in cinemas on 14 June and on BFI Player from 22 July.