Lemonade Blessing

At this private Catholic school, students are schooled in restraint and the reverent pursuit of feminine virtue — but teenagers, as ever, have their own curriculum: horny guys who have never been on a date but have watched plenty of porn, and girls who dream of kissing and hanging out in town but whose strict parents never let them out. Among the students is fifteen-year-old John (Jake Ryan, memorable from Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City), raised by his devout single mother (Jeanine Serralles, from the series Utopia). He doesn’t quite fit in with his rowdy classmates or with the pious commandments of his God-fearing teachers. He finds a kindred spirit and perhaps his first love in the rebellious Lilith (Skye Alyssa Friedman), who first rejects him and reports on him, but slowly begins to let him in. Physically too, though on her own terms. The tasks she sets for him involve acts of blasphemy: from uttering “Fuck Jesus” to desecrating the host. Caught between a devout mother and his growing desire, how will the boy reconcile these contradictions? Lemonade Blessing is a brilliant satire of religious education in America (and beyond), as well as a deeply empathetic portrait of the nightmare that is adolescence.