Watching Àma Gloria, I was reminded that childminders occupy a unique position in society, being entrusted with the care and development of children, forging intimate bonds with them and seeing them through their formative years. For busy parents, childminders can often become the people who see the milestone moments, who comfort children through daily challenges, who enjoy the magical moments of play and development.

But they’re employees, not family, and as the child grows, they most often leave, fondly remembered but no longer included. It’s a unique form of intimacy that’s often overlooked, and can be complicated by issues of class, race, and culture.

Many childminders for white families can be from different races, countries and cultures, spending time with their employers’ children in order to make money to support their own.

These complexities are explored in Maria Amachoukeli’s delicate, beautifully observed feature, Àma Gloria. The French director won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for her 2014 debut feature Party Girl, a warm and tender portrait of a woman fighting against her fear of aging into loneliness and irrelevance, as she nears 60. Amachoukeli’s ability to address societal issues in a way that feel personal and lived-in, rather than didactic, again shines through in her follow-up, which features a tender and tactile shooting style and performances that are utterly authentic and immersive.

Based on the director’s own relationship with her Portuguese childhood nanny, Àma Gloria stars Louise Mauroy-Panzani as six year old Cléo, whose mother has died and whose father is still numb with grief. The light in Cléo’s life is Gloria (Ilça Moreno Zego), her Cape Verdean carer, who brings her to school in the morning, plays with her during the day, and tucks her in at night.

As her father grieves, only seen in the waning evening light, contrasting with Gloria and Cléo's sun-streaked days, it’s clear that Glora and Cléo have a light, mutually adoring relationship, often shot in tender close-up to show the tactile connection between Gloria’s soft-spoken warmth and Cléo’s giggling tumble of curls and Coke-bottle glasses. So it comes as a shock to both when Gloria’s mother dies and she has to return to Cape Verde.

To soften the blow, Cléo’s father agrees to let Glora bring her to Cape Verde; one last summer before they are separated forever. Waiting for Gloria are her pregnant daughter Fernanda (Abnara Gomes Varela) and her young son César (Fredy Gomes Tavares), angry and resentful that his mother has spent years raising Cléo, not him. There are other demands on Gloria’s attention, too: a hotel she is trying to renovate and an old love, long neglected while she was in Paris. In between running and swimming around Cape Verde with César, Cléo gets glimpses of these parts of Gloria’s life, realising that she is no longer the centre of Gloria’s world.

Six years old at the time of filming, Louise Mauroy-Panzani’s performance has an innocence and openness that feels utterly authentic, and over the course of one summer, we see Cléo experience disruption, betrayal and painful growth as Maria Amachoukeli’s shows us this child’s journey to her age of reason, that often painful period of emotional growth when children develop a conscience and begin to understand the complexity of the world around them.

Lovely, flowing hand-painted sequences gives us dreamy insights into Cléo’s imagination and emotional processing and cinematographer Inès Tabarin’s camerawork is close and lingering, showing every flicker of Mauroy-Panzani’s wide-eyed expression. When Cléo does something truly terrible, the camera follows her running away, capturing how guilt, shame, and painful self-awareness rapidly registers across her little face and body.

There are allegories in Àma Gloria if audiences want to find them, about European colonisation of African nations and the backlash when they sought independence; and there’s a prescience to highlighting how immigrants are often entrusted to care for so many people in society yet still go unrecognised and dehumanised, their struggles and sacrifices unacknowledged.

But these metaphors are secondary to the depth and beauty of its central portrait of a young girl learning about love, loss – and herself.

Also out this week: Inside Out 2, Wilding, Sasquatch Sunset.