Maura Delpero’s second feature film (after Maternal, focusing on young single mothers living in hostels run by nuns) is a slow-burn family saga set in 1944. Beautifully acted by a cast mixing actors and non-professionals, Martina Scrinzi particularly shines as the family’s eldest daughter Lucia – her performance won her an award at the prestigious Venice Film Festival. The film is gorgeously shot by cinematographer Mikhail Krichman (DoP for Leviathan, also shown by WFC), whose rarely moving camera evokes both paintings and the theatre.  

The film was inspired by a dream Delpero had about her father as a child, playing with his nine siblings in their childhood home Vermiglio, a village high in the Italian Alps.  While its high elevation and distance from urban conurbations enabled Vermiglio to avoid the horrors of WW2, the film depicts a period of great change for the family, the local community, and Italy as a whole. Delpero’s extended family contributed memories to weave into the film – the romance at the centre of the film is based on one that happened within her family.   

The village of Vermiglio celebrated the opening of the film with a big party. Delpero comments that this is “because the village itself participated in the movie.  Everyone has a sister or an aunt that was in the film. … I was very respectful. I was not going there with the big cinema machine. That makes the difference.”

“Immense subtlety and quiet observation … a peculiar three-way push-pull between phenomenal restraint, whispered yearning and bitter resentment.”  Nick James, Sight and Sound 

“A rich, enveloping film that asks viewers to approach it as if tiptoeing through the snow.” Ben Konigsberg, New York Times