VERMIGLIO
Venice 81 – Competition
Italy/France/Belgium, 2024 – Director Maura Delpero – Cast Martina Scrinzi, Rachele Potrich, Anna Thaler, Tommaso Ragno, Roberta Rovelli, Sara Serraiocco – Running time 119′ – Distribution Lucky Red
Maura Delpero has a peculiar relationship with time and space. Vermiglio, for example, is her second fiction feature. But the Italian filmmaker’s career has now spanned almost twenty years, beginning in 2005 with the documentary Moglie e buoi dei paesi tuoi, in which she recounted the integration of South Tyrolean and Italian children within the school institution, starting from the Bolzano primary schools classes of 1939 and ending in 2005. A theme, that of school, which she would take up again in Signori Professori, in 2008 in competition at the Turin Film Festival, the story of three teachers of different ages between Bologna, Naples and Bolzano again. Nadea and Sveta, on the other hand, are the protagonists of the 2012 documentary of the same name, the story of two Moldavian women in Italy in which one of the main themes is motherhood, which would later become the narrative driving force behind Maternal, her first work of fiction, presented in competition at the 2019 Locarno Film Festival and then ended up in limbo caused by Covid. So much so that Delpero would only be nominated for David and Nastri d’Argento in 2022 once the film arrived in Italian cinemas. Time and space are, to a large extent, also the protagonists of Vermiglio, which is a village in the mountains of Trentino, in which, however, the hands of history run slower. It is 1944, and there is war in the valley. The inhabitants of Vermiglio know this, but their lives go on as usual. There are three sisters in Vermiglio: Lucia, Ada and Flavia. One day, their family welcomes a soldier who has found refuge in the mountains into their home. And things, at least for the three of them, change. There is an essential artistic coherence in Maura Delpero’s journey. A brief analysis like this is enough to understand that we are dealing with an influential author who is at a professional crossroads with her selection in the official competition at the Venice Film Festival. She has been helped in this adventure by her three protagonists, Martina Scrinzi, Rachele Potrich and Anna Thaler, absolute beginners who leave their mark. Tommaso Ragno, Roberta Rovelli (seen this year in the Netflix phenomenon The Mourner) and Sara Serraiocco are alongside them. Speaking of Vermiglio, Maura Delpero says that «the humus of the film is the roots. One day, I found myself with a folder of notes from many years ago called Vermiglio: evidently, I was thinking of doing something about this place of the soul».
