For a teenager, or a child, entering foster care means becoming a part of a protected zone that can save their life. This is the general assumption of every vicissitude that affects children that the community (and sometimes even their families) has deemed as “problematic” or “impossible to deal with.” However, every story has its own characteristics that make it unique and with a different ending for each protagonist.

“Protected Zone” is a docu-series that tells these unique stories through the voices of some of the children in foster care. To help them share their stories are five young filmmakers and directors, about the same age of the protagonists, who will try to understand and give back to the viewer a fragment of the lives of the children they met in different communities.

A cream-colored tunic and stole hanging from a window, an old gray Skoda, a sign on the windshield: “Priester im Dienst”— priest on duty. Christine arranges books and vestments in a plastic trolley, they are the tools of her daily routine. For almost twenty years she has been faithfully dedicated to her chosen profession: Roman Catholic bishop.

Christine is sixty-five-years-old and lives with her friend Raphael in an old farm house in Upper Austria. She had a full life before becoming a bishop; she received a Catholic education and became a Benedictine nun as well as a high school teacher. She later met and married a divorced man, which caused her to lose the right to work for the Church. In 2002, after decades of fighting for women’s rights to join the priesthood, she and six other women embarked on a journey on the Danube and was ordained a priest by an Argentine bishop. The official Vatican excommunication did not prevent the group from forming a movement that today has hundreds of members around the world and which rejects exclusion from the Catholic faith.

The film intertwines moments from Christine’s daily life, her relationship with the faithful and long journeys, political battles and international activism with the apprenticeship of a new candidate for the priesthood. After a long period of silence, a few years ago Christine began to receive requests from women who wanted to prepare for the priesthood: the long-awaited meeting with younger female generation finally allows her to reconnect with her ideals, her personal journey and a painful yet powerful choice.