Starring Laia Artigas. In Catalan, with English subtitles. Rated G

Although its story is of everyday problems and people, Summer 1993 is a very unusual movie. First-time featuremaker Carla Simón draws on her own childhood for this naturalistic study, but it’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen that. What’s different is her almost complete dismissal of the conflicts generally used to heighten drama in any long-form narrative.

Curly-haired newcomer Laia Artigas, only eight when this was made, holds her own against an experienced adult cast. That’s fortunate, since she’s in every scene as Frida, a spunky urbanite whose summer—set 25 years ago—is marked first by the loss of her mother and then by a move to the remote countryside of Catalonia. It’s already offbeat that the movie is in Catalan, and more so that it’s stingy with background information, only gradually teased out over a leisurely 95 minutes.

Frida’s mom, who died of a disease no one talks about, had two sisters and a brother, Esteve (David Verdaguer), with the latter agreeing to take the orphaned girl to their rundown but very appealing stone house in the sticks. Her care really falls to Esteve’s patient but no-nonsense young wife, Marga (cast standout Bruna Cusí, an Iberian Charlotte Gainsbourg type), who already has a lively five-year-old (Paula Robles) on her hands. It’s a double adjustment for Frida, whose grief, lightly blanketed by Catholic rituals imparted by her black-clad grandma, is coupled with basic disorientation; her old life, running in the old streets of Barcelona, has been suddenly replaced by the slow pace of the wooded Pyrenees countryside, near the French border.

The movie itself reflects that tempo, with less emphasis on dialogue than on airy moods transmitted by the director’s sure touch. This comes with the aid of Santiago Racaj’s handheld camera, usually shooting from a child’s point of view, and a score by Pau Boïgues and Ernesto Pipó crafted to resemble exploratory jazz of the early 1960s. The result, if you let it, will carry you back to the deeper sensations of childhood, when every event—whether happy, tragic, or anything in between—imparted the urgent question: “What next?”