Vermiglio (2024)
Directed by Maura Delpero
“Those who return from war carry secrets,” whispers the town of Vermiglio, the last municipality in Val di Sole, Trentino, a historic borderland. It’s the winter of 1944, the final days of World War II echo faintly (in newspaper headlines) and resound closely (in the hope for loved ones to return from the front). Economic crisis, political instability, the new role of women in public life, and ancient cultural taboos—Vermiglio is a sentimental microcosm reflecting Italy at the end of its “year zero.” What happens? Pietro, a young Sicilian soldier, likely a deserter, takes refuge in the snow-covered mountains. Pietro is an unexpected guest whom the village welcomes with great suspicion, torn between worry and unease. Vermiglio is governed by a strict matriarchy, where the female figure (particularly the maternal one) embodies the art of cultivating and caring for the land and nature. Pietro is a stern, almost gruff man, yet his connection to the women is central. Ada wishes to continue studying but is destined to sacrifice herself for her family, while her younger sister, Flavia, is the designated heir, expected to relieve the burden of a life already perceived as empty and devoid of responsibility. War, Ada’s love for Pietro, and the need to formalize their relationship all disrupt the village’s fragile peace.
Vermiglio is a captivating and unsettling film, built on constant narrative ellipses where events often occur off-screen (such as Pietro’s eventual death), leaving us viewers to share in the characters’ silences. The drama quietly seeps into everyday life, into the passing of time and seasons, becoming an objective correlative of the difficulty in aligning action with emotion. Think of Ada’s wonderful character and her search for identity, set against the backdrop of both a collective tragedy (the war) and a private one (her sister Lucia’s pregnancy), which demand center stage. And yet Ada manages to evoke “contemporary” emotions and reflections, contained within a few stolen scenes from the main action lines.
The aesthetic archive and metaphorical style of filmmakers like Pietrangeli, Olmi, or Pasolini are frequently evoked and reimagined without sterile imitation. Similarly, the boundary between documentary practices and fictional drives is repeatedly crossed in the rich anthropological work with actors and locations. This formal rigor once again makes the theme of motherhood universal, between public and private dimensions, folklore and sorrow. Admittedly, the film suffers from some stereotypical characterizations and narrative simplifications in its understandable concern to address numerous contemporary issues (war, motherhood, the female condition, sexual orientation, etc.). Yet, there is so much to explore, as Delpero continues to trust her framing, allowing for multiple interpretations and granting us ample time for reflection. This is a film that still believes in the power of places and faces as vehicles for transcending contingent stories, inscribing itself in the tradition of Italian cinema that finds ethical necessity in form. Vermiglio is a sincere and honest film, once again confirming Maura Delpero’s personal and perceptive directorial voice, enriching the landscape of contemporary Italian cinema.
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Maura Delpero finds war and peace in family form: talented, immensely talented, between Olmi and Philibert.
Maura Delpero, talented, immensely talented. After the multi-award-winning Maternal (2019), she now turns—without deviating from themes of womanhood and (multi)motherhood—to the father, her own, tracing within ancestral experiences a small, old world and the challenges of today, or rather of the universal human experience. A kind of Paternal, though never paternalistic, shaped by the death—and the dream of him as a child in the family home—of her father, and elevated to an existential poem, never reduced to the anthropological or the naturalistic, despite both being rigorously considered with a scholarly approach.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs was the comparison made by the director of the 81st Venice Film Festival, Alberto Barbera, when presenting Vermiglio, but alongside the finesse seen in the children and adolescents of Doillon and Philibert, there is also a kind of esprit de geometrie reminiscent of Haneke—a stylistic and moral choreography of society as a whole. Delpero both moderates and unseats expectations, asserting a true “cinema-cinema” even where the image seems to relent from formal demands and dialogue takes precedence.
The microcosm is never truly micro, the family is a chorus with soloists who are never domineering or, at least, not overpowering: Chopin, Schubert, and Vivaldi, who provides the soundtrack for the four seasons in which the Second World War ends, though peace does not arrive for the Graziadei family, a predominantly female household led by father and schoolteacher Cesare (a superb Tommaso Ragno) and surrounded by many women, girls, and young ladies, each with her own outspokenness and, when necessary, rejection of a predestined fate.
The story delves into the everyday, the ordinary, yet always complex and laborious, filled with questioning—children in shared beds constantly asking, asking, and asking again. The war barely brushes the surface, but Vermiglio, adjacent to the more famous Passo del Tonale, is not entirely untouched by conflict: Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) is expecting a child from a soldier she barely knows; the mother, Adele (Roberta Rovelli), has just given birth to her ninth child; the sister Ada (Rachele Potrich, an impressive newcomer) is torn between faith and desire; the other sister, Flavia (Anna Thaler), excels in school, and her father decides she will go to boarding school; while brother Dino (Patrick Gardner) is not exactly in the good graces of the patriarch, who even fails him in school.
The narrative flows in a parataxis that is never sloppy, with an agrarian and devout contemplation that links Olmi with Piavoli, a tranquility that prepares for epiphanies—quiet, understated epiphanies—with a family polyphony that feels like a stream of consciousness, or better yet, a Zeitgeist.
In the parallel convergences of these unremarkable men’s and women’s lives—connected by love, pain, and resilience—Delpero crafts a cinematic hypothesis, synthesizing Maternal and her previous documentary experiences with greater ambition, free will, and a calm that is never dull or speculative, where desire, which is pure cinema, does not bow to necessity but sharpens.
The acting direction is excellent, the non-spectacular tone is precious, and the war-and-peace poetry is remarkable. We have a true filmmaker: Maura Delpero, well-deservedly in competition at Venice 81 with Vermiglio.
Cinematografo, September 2, 2024
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di Paolo Baldini
Vermiglio, by Maura Delpero, is the film Italy has submitted for the Oscar selection as Best International Feature Film. It triumphed over 18 other titles, including the favorite Parthenope by Paolo Sorrentino, who said he was “sincerely pleased” with the decision. Vermiglio won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and will compete for the shortlist of the 15 best international films selected by the Academy, to be announced on December 17, 2024. The Oscar nominations will be revealed on January 17, 2025, and the ceremony will take place on March 2, 2025.
It’s said that for Italian cinema to rise again and escape the mire of crisis, it needs to find good stories, whether dramas, tragedies, or comedies. Well-told stories, with significant meanings, surprising narrative twists, and exemplary shifts in tone.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at Venice was awarded to Vermiglio, a textured serialized drama by Bolzano-born documentarian Maura Delpero, 48, in her second feature after Maternal (2018).
A story of harsh mountain life, set in the small village of Vermiglio, with just a few hundred inhabitants in Alto Trentino, Val di Sole, between 1944 and 1945.
A world apart, barely touched by the war. The only one who reads the newspaper, carefully turning the pages, is the schoolteacher Graziadei, an elegant man in a waistcoat, the austere pater familias of the entire community, with seven children and a wife who runs the household and dispenses wise advice.
Graziadei is the intellectual of the village, and everyone, mostly illiterate, listens to him and respects him. He single-handedly runs the small school, where he reconnects with some of his students. Few gestures are needed, just a glance. Life in that slice of land beneath the mountains moves slowly, in step with the passing seasons: the milking that provides fresh milk for breakfast, the frugal and silent meals, the pastures and barns. The bombs are far away, and the devastation of war is limited to occasional enemy air raids on missions.
An apparent balance holds the emotions together, which are all restrained, concealed, hidden—emphasized by the music of Chopin and Vivaldi.
The calm before the storm. Indeed, something unexpected happens: the arrival of a young Sicilian soldier, an outsider, changes the rhythm of things. Lucia, Graziadei’s eldest daughter, falls in love with the soldier and immediately thinks of marriage. The two desire each other, love each other, and swear eternal love.
The joy of the wedding overshadows her family’s doubts. Then the young man must return to Sicily to settle things at home but leaves behind only a mysterious silence. The rest is a dark melodrama with revelations and recognitions. A moral tale reminiscent of The Tree of Wooden Clogs, a memoir that alternates between quiet and dramatic moments among goats and mules, rocks, snow, and streams, spoken in a dialect so thick it requires subtitles.
Here, it’s not grenades that explode in battle, but emotions and passions. The harmony of nature hides deep pain and disillusionment.
Delpero, who filmed while nursing her child, moves the plot with the intensity and stroke of a naturalistic fresco, bringing that ancient world inside us. Tommaso Ragno is the stern schoolteacher Graziadei: he speaks few words, using glances instead—just the right ones. He makes himself understood by example.
Corriere della Sera, September 24, 2024
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by Raffaele Meale
Five years after her debut film Maternal, 48-year-old Bolzano-born director Maura Delpero returns to the helm with Vermiglio, an ambitious tale of a family in a remote village in the Rhaetian Alps at the end of World War II. The work draws inspiration from the contemplative cinema of Ermanno Olmi and aims to narrate the desires and frustrations of a forgotten world. In competition at the Venice Film Festival.
Stories from the Schoolmaster’s House
In four seasons, nature completes its cycle. A girl can become a woman. A womb can swell and give life to a new creature. One can lose the path that once led safely home, or sail across seas to unknown lands. In four seasons, one can die and be reborn. Vermiglio tells the story of the last year of World War II within a large family and how, paradoxically, with the arrival of a refugee soldier, the family loses its peace just as the world is regaining its own.
Vermiglio, which lends its name to the second feature by Bolzano director Maura Delpero, is a small village with barely two thousand inhabitants, situated at the border between Trentino and Lombardy, about 1,200 meters above sea level in the Southern Rhaetian Alps. An isolated place, far from everything and everyone, yet it found itself unwittingly caught in the middle of two world wars. During the 1915-18 war, with fighting at the Tonale Pass—just a dozen kilometers from the village—the citizens were evacuated to Mitterndorf in Lower Austria. During World War II, when Vermiglio was part of Italy, it became a zone of partisan battles and Nazi-Fascist reprisals. It is during this historical period, starting in 1944, that Delpero’s film unfolds, marking her return to directing five years after the well-received Maternal, which competed at the Locarno Film Festival and earned a special mention. While German troops continued to control the Alpine region, Vermiglio faced an issue close to home: the schoolmaster’s family had decided to shelter both the teacher’s nephew and a fellow soldier in the barn where they kept their hay, as both were deserters. Of course, no one had the courage to report them, but this single detail was enough to shatter the apparent tranquility of the place, its placid routine of gestures and situations. The same natural ease that accepted—even without excessive drama—the death of one or two infants. Such is life, one might say.
Delpero starts from her roots, dedicating the film to her loved ones. After portraying the story of a novice nun and two single mothers in a Buenos Aires shelter, she focuses on her ancestors, the people she comes from, and the dialectic between rural tradition and (early) signs of modernity.
In this sense, the key character is the patriarch, played by the always excellent Tommaso Ragno, though he is not the true protagonist of the story—that role belongs to three of the daughters, ranging in age from twelve to twenty-one. He is the one who unsettles Vermiglio in his own way: the village intellectual who reads the newspaper at the inn where others play cards, teaches children and adolescents in the morning, and elders in the evening. Despite his meager pay and seven children to feed, he doesn’t deny himself a precious vinyl record from “the city.” He’s the one, in Delpero’s usual chiaroscuro depiction of human characters, who preaches tolerance of the outsider (his nephew’s fellow soldier is Sicilian and falls in love with his eldest daughter, Lucia), yet rules his household with near-absolute authority, where everything must follow his orders—even denying his children the right to touch a map, lest their fingers smudge the paper. A patriarch of a system that has persisted unchanged for centuries, Mr. Graziadei lives in an intellectual fortress that remains unshaken, blind to the reality outside.
However, Delpero favors the perspective of the daughters, and in the interactions between Lucia, Ada, and Flavia, she captures a world in flux, where change is not guaranteed. The family cannot afford to send all three daughters to school, and so, by the father’s unilateral decision, Ada will not go beyond her diploma. Even this diploma is withheld in an authoritarian gesture from the eldest son, who once encountered a bear on his way and seems more attached to the land than anyone else. The land is the material foundation of life, even though Chopin can nourish the soul and soothe the pain.
A deep discomfort permeates Vermiglio, the pain of being alive and of knowing one’s finitude—physical and even moral. Love is only a distraction because relationships are transient—whether someone leaves to visit family in Sicily or, like Ada’s carefree peer, departs to seek fortune with her mother in South America, in Chile. Meanwhile, Delpero, following in the footsteps of Ermanno Olmi or Georges Rouquier, effectively navigates the seasons, following their rhythms and in turn breaking a ritual of sorts: the antiseptic production style of contemporary cinema, which reduces everything to a pre-digested format. Instead, here we return to a cinema of a different era, thanks also to the splendid cinematography by Mikhail Krichman (previously a director of photography for Aleksei Fedorchenko and Andrey Zvyagintsev) and a visual approach that integrates a classic narrative structure with a study of the territory. The use of non-professional actors breathes life into faces, gestures, and postures, allowing Vermiglio to stand apart from conventional filmmaking. Even some of the film’s weaknesses and forced moments, or its less inspired scenes, find an ideal balance, still open to life—like the waiting for a letter that never arrives, or the suggestion that those who return from war always carry secrets.
There is a moral strength in Delpero’s cinema that never turns into moralism—unlike Ragno’s character—and in these dark times for Italian film production, this is a precious element worth preserving.
Quinlan, September 2, 2024
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by Massimo Lastrucci
Between 1944 and 1945 in Trentino and South Tyrol, three sisters, Flavia, Lucia, and Ada, are no longer girls but not yet women. The family’s balance is upended by the arrival of a refugee soldier.
In 2019, a small, compact, and poignant debut film enjoyed the rare fortune of winning a prize at Locarno, receiving two nominations for Best First Feature at the David di Donatello and Nastri d’Argento Awards, and gaining praise across international festivals and various distribution platforms. The film was titled Maternal, directed by Bolzano-born Maura Delpero. A similar depth of themes and the same precision of touch are now evident in Vermiglio (the name of a village in the province of Trento, but also the filmmaker’s spiritual place, inevitably enriched by the evocative nature of the name). This film was aptly chosen to compete at the Venice Film Festival. Delpero defines it as “family lexicon,” blending fiction with autobiographical evocation.
The film unfolds over the course of a year—the fateful final year of World War II—through the four seasons of this village/community perched in the mountains, where the figure of the schoolteacher, father of 10 children (among those who survived and those who did not), exerts calm yet haughty authority. The family also hosts a Sicilian deserter in the barn, awaiting a change in events. Amidst the villagers’ mix of respect and suspicion toward the outsider, a passionate and unstoppable relationship develops between him and the eldest daughter (Martina Scrinzi), leading to radical consequences.
While the rural, mountainous setting inevitably suggests comparisons with filmmakers of spiritual and poetic inspiration (how can one not think of Olmi, with that modest and moral use of dialect as language? One might even risk drawing parallels, perhaps incongruously, with the austere, “religious” purity of Bresson, the late Malick, or Michelangelo Frammartino), the elegy of this secluded, somewhat outdated place does not exclude its filtered interaction with national culture and civilization. The father, portrayed with brooding composure by Tommaso Ragno, orders classical music records (including Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons) and recites poetry books, those foundational to the school curriculum of the time. He is preoccupied with teaching basic knowledge to the village children (including his own), though his severity as both a teacher and parent provokes traumas and obvious injustices, particularly when he has to choose which one of his children to make sacrifices for in order to send to boarding school. Meanwhile, his usually silent wife and mother (a strongly expressive Roberta Rovelli, focused on her household chores) delivers the film’s most powerful and meaningful line, finally reacting to the constant scolding of their eldest son (disregarded by his father) after he was blamed for “stealing” flowers to give to her following her latest childbirth: “Out of 10 children, you haven’t brought me flowers even once!” A painful and angry rebuke, more revealing than many words.
Traditional music, mountain culture, dialect, rustic tragedies, monasticism as a choice of rebellion and freedom, and motherhood as a natural, unquestioned consequence—all these unfold with a rhythm far removed from more commercial cinema. Vermiglio is, in the words of its lucid creator, above all “a landscape of the soul,” to be approached with respect and admiration.
Cineforum, September 18, 2024
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Grand Jury Prize winner, Vermiglio is a film about the experience of war from the margins, about being a woman in a difficult time, and about the freedom that creeps in, spreads, and overturns the world. A beautiful film by Maura Delpero.
by Roberto Manassero
Vermiglio is a mountain village between Trentino and Lombardy, the birthplace of Maura Delpero’s father. It’s a place closed off by high peaks, both suffocating and welcoming. The story of the film, shot there, takes place between 1944 and 1945, during the cold months before the war’s end and then into the following seasons. The family at the center of the story—led by the local schoolteacher, managed by the ever-pregnant mother, and consisting of sons and daughters—lives as everyone did in that era: crammed into a modest house, sleeping two or more to a bed, milking the cow, working the land, speaking dialect, learning Italian, and using Latin for prayers.
The residents of Vermiglio know the world only from the few books available (an atlas to dream of Sicilian oranges) or through the war, which, as the schoolteacher says, “no longer reaches us here,” but from which a nephew has recently returned, helped by a Sicilian fellow prisoner who saved his life and is now hiding as a deserter. Vermiglio is a self-sufficient microcosm reflecting the common peasant condition of Italy at the time. It delves into the specifics of a land while using a universal language, a family lexicon. The film narrates the rigid structure of the community and the beginning of its unraveling, the breaking of a balance of exploitation and devotion that had remained unchanged for generations, set to collapse after World War II. The love between the family’s eldest daughter, Lucia, and the Sicilian soldier, Pietro, sparks the change, but it’s the direction that truly conveys the contradictory and destructive forces of historical processes.
Delpero uses tight frames filled with details, often interrupted by sharp editing cuts. Through the cycle of the seasons, she visually captures the timelessness of nature (the blue of winter, the green of the warm months) and, through external signals (the roar of an airplane, newspapers, photographs), the intrusion of another reality. In sequences showing peasant traditions (mass, Christmas dinner, weddings, tavern gossip), she introduces characters, emotions, and events (the madwoman, sexuality, emigration, crime) that this world cannot contain. She rarely uses wide shots, instead opting for a proper distance that reflects the perspectives of the various characters: the strict but dignified father; the subservient but not submissive mother; the eldest daughter, shattered by the truth about her husband; the grown son destined for farm work; the soldier broken by the front; the teenage daughter discovering desire; the youngest, drawn to literature; and the little one who asks questions about everything. Vermiglio is a fragment of history from within; it is fixed and ephemeral like time itself, full of grace yet strikingly clear in confronting the disappearance of a world in which, still today and for who knows how long, Italian society has its roots.
FilmTV, September 19, 2024
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by Alberto Piroddi
Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio opens with a slow, deliberate sweep of the snow-covered mountains, and immediately, you feel the weight of what’s about to unfold. The landscape is vast, cold, and indifferent, much like the lives of the villagers clinging to it in the final days of World War II. We’re in Vermiglio, a small, insular town in the mountains of Trentino, where the war exists more as a distant rumor than a tangible threat. That’s the paradox of this film: the world outside is collapsing, but inside this village, life carries on with the drudgery of milking cows, preparing meals, and raising children. It’s a quiet apocalypse—a microcosm of Italy at the end of its “year zero.”
Pietro, a Sicilian soldier, is introduced as a kind of wandering ghost. He’s likely a deserter, but the film never lingers on the details. His past is irrelevant to the village; it’s his presence, his disruption of the static daily rhythm, that matters. The women of Vermiglio—the real rulers of this matriarchal society—meet Pietro with suspicion, as if sensing the unspoken secrets he carries. The men are mostly absent, lost to war or otherwise silent and withdrawn, and Pietro’s arrival challenges the fragile equilibrium of this female-dominated community.
The film’s premise might suggest a straightforward war drama, but Delpero is less interested in the mechanics of conflict than in its aftershocks. Vermiglio is a film of silences—those long, pregnant pauses that hang between dialogue, or the empty spaces where significant moments occur off-screen. Delpero trusts her audience enough to let them sit with those gaps, forcing us to lean in and fill in the blanks ourselves. It’s a demanding way to tell a story, one that asks for patience, but the payoff is immense. The film is a slow burn, building tension through omission rather than action.
At the heart of Vermiglio is the character of Ada, a young woman who’s torn between her desire for something more and the pull of her responsibilities. Ada wants to study, to break free from the path set for her by her family and tradition, but she’s trapped by the circumstances of her life—her family’s needs, the village’s expectations, and the war’s shadow. Rachele Potrich plays Ada with a restrained intensity; you can see the turmoil churning beneath her surface, even as she remains stoic and dutiful on the outside.
Pietro’s arrival disrupts more than just the daily routines—it unsettles the emotional lives of the women, particularly Ada and her sister Flavia. Pietro becomes the object of Ada’s affections, but it’s not a romantic plot in any conventional sense. Their relationship is complicated, hesitant, and largely unspoken, reflecting the emotional repression that defines much of the village’s social order. Pietro is a stranger, an outsider, and in him, Ada sees not just a man but a symbol of escape, of something beyond the narrow confines of Vermiglio.
But this isn’t the kind of film that offers easy resolutions or redemptive love stories. Pietro’s fate is sealed long before the film reaches its conclusion, and his death happens off-screen, as so many crucial events do in Vermiglio. It’s a choice that could frustrate some viewers, but Delpero’s decision to withhold these moments from us is central to her film’s power. What matters isn’t the spectacle of Pietro’s death, but the quiet devastation it leaves in its wake. The villagers carry on, the seasons change, but the loss lingers in the spaces between words, in the hollow glances exchanged between characters.
Vermiglio is steeped in the tradition of Italian neorealism, but it doesn’t feel like an exercise in nostalgia or imitation. Delpero clearly draws from the aesthetic rigor of filmmakers like Ermanno Olmi and the anthropological gaze of Pasolini, yet she makes those influences her own. There’s a rawness to the film, a rough-hewn quality to its images that feels organic rather than calculated. The cinematography, by Mikhail Krichman, captures the stark beauty of the landscape without romanticizing it. The mountains loom ominously in the background, a constant reminder of the isolation and the hardships that define these characters’ lives.
Delpero also blurs the line between fiction and documentary in a way that feels fresh rather than contrived. The non-professional actors, many of whom are actual villagers, bring an authenticity to the film that’s hard to manufacture. Their faces, weathered and worn, tell stories that dialogue never could. You feel the weight of history in every frame, the sense that these lives are shaped not just by the war but by centuries of tradition and hardship. It’s a film deeply embedded in its setting, and that setting—both the physical landscape and the social structures that govern the village—becomes a character in its own right.
One of the film’s most striking achievements is the way it handles the theme of motherhood. In Vermiglio, motherhood is not just a biological role but a social one, a position of authority and burden. The matriarchy that governs the village is built on the backs of mothers—women who are expected to nurture, protect, and maintain the delicate balance of their community. Yet Delpero refuses to idealize this role. Motherhood in Vermiglio is fraught with tension and sacrifice, and the film explores the ways it can trap women as much as it empowers them.
If there’s a flaw in Vermiglio, it’s that it occasionally succumbs to a kind of narrative over-determination. There are moments when the film seems too eager to address every contemporary issue—war, motherhood, the female condition, sexual orientation—without fully integrating them into the story. The film’s ambition is admirable, but it sometimes feels like it’s trying to do too much at once. Still, these missteps are minor in the grand scheme of things, and they don’t detract from the film’s overall impact.
Vermiglio is not a film for everyone. Its pace is deliberate, its drama understated, and its silences can feel oppressive. But for those willing to sit with it, to engage with its quiet rhythms and unspoken tensions, it’s a deeply rewarding experience. Maura Delpero has crafted a film that’s both timeless and timely, one that finds the universal in the particular and the extraordinary in the everyday.
La Voce della Sera, September 28, 2024
* * *
Winner of the Silver Lion. Grand Jury Prize at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.
- Director: Maura Delpero
- Year: 2024
- Countries: Italy, France, Belgium
- Genre: Drama
- Runtime: 119 minutes
- Release Date: September 19, 2024 (Italy)
- Cast: Tommaso Ragno, Giuseppe De Domenico, Roberto Rovelli, Martina Scrinzi, Orietta Notari, Carlotta Gamba, Santiago Fondsevia Santer, Rachele Potrich, Anna Thaler, Patrick Gardner, Enrico Panizza, Luis Thaler, Simone Bendetti, Sara Serraiocco
- Distributor: Lucky Red
