Vermiglio

Just as too many cooks can ruin the stew, too many story threads can ruin a movie, and that’s very much the case with writer-director Maura Delpero’s fourth feature film. This Golden Globe nominee for Best International Film follows the lives of a family in a village in the Italian Alps in 1944. The family patriarch and town schoolteacher, Cesare (Tommaso Regno), along with his wife and army of eight children shelter a pair of Italian army deserters, hiding them from Axis Forces in search of the runaways. While in seclusion, one of the soldiers, Pietro (Giuseppe Di Domenico), falls in love…

With the war now heading firmly in the favour of the allies, Italian soldiers are deserting in droves and one of them, Sicilian "Pietro" (Giuseppe De Domenico) arrives, wounded, in the eponymous Italian village where they know what he has done. Opinion is divided on what to do next, given many have lost their sons in the war or are still ignorant of their whereabouts, but he has the support of the influential schoolmaster "Graziadei" (Tommaso Ragno). It's his daughter "Lucia" (Martina Scrinzi) to whom he takes a bit of a shine, and she readily reciprocates. They marry and all seems rosy…

Summary: 9/10: a visually stunning, thematically rich meditation on family, power, tradition, and the slow work of change, anchored in historical specificity while speaking to timeless questions about who holds power and at what cost. What appears to be a slice-of-life film based on Maura Delpero's experiences growing up in the Italian Alps reveals itself as something far more complex: a richly layered drama of family life and relationships set at the end of World War II. Delpero herself wasn't even born yet when these events transpired, which means we must assume that life in a remote…