Selected as Italy’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 97th Academy Awards, Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio is a period drama set in a remote Italian mountain village in 1944. The film tells the story of a family whose lives are altered by the arrival of a soldier who has deserted the war.
Vermiglio world premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival where it won multiple awards including the Grand Jury Prize. The film was then screened at other festivals, including the 49th Toronto International Film Festival, the 68th BFI London Film Festival, and the 60th Chicago Film Festival where it won the Gold Hugo for Best Film. The film recently earned a nomination for the 82nd Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language category.
Vermiglio stars Martina Scrinzi, Tommaso Ragno, Giuseppe De Domenico, Roberta Rovelli, Rachele Potrich, Anna Thaler, Carlotta Gamba, and Orietta Notari.
Release Date
Directed by Maura Delpero, Vermiglio opens in select US theaters on December 25, 2024.
Synopsis
1944. In Vermiglio, a mountain village where the war is a distant but omnipresent horizon, the arrival of Pietro, a soldier escaping the war, disrupts the dynamics of the local schoolmaster’s large family, changing them forever. The love between Pietro and Lucia, the eldest daughter, leads to their marriage and an unexpected destiny.
“A story of war without bombs, or great battles. In the uncompromising logic of the mountain that every day reminds man how small he is,” says director Maura Delpero in the director’s statement of the film. “Vermiglio is a landscape of the soul, a “family saying” that lives inside me, on the threshold of the unconscious, an act of love for my father, his family and their small village. Travelling through a personal time, it wants to pay homage to a collective memory.”
Reviews
Peter Bradshaw in a Guardian review gave the film a score of 4/5, writing, “It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.”
Jessica Kiang in a Variety review also praised the film, writing, “The remarkable, raw-boned and ravishing Vermiglio takes place in the past but operates like a future family secret playing out in the present tense, a perspective that is not quite Godlike, but comes from that which we might as well call God.”
Official Trailer
Watch the official trailer for Vermiglio.