The Eight Mountains

Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch's The Eight Mountains premiered in competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival in May 2022, where it shared the Jury Prize with Jerzy Skolimowski's EO. It is the first feature the Belgian husband-and-wife team have co-directed (van Groeningen previously made The Broken Circle Breakdown and Beautiful Boy; Vandermeersch is best known as an actress) and adapts Paolo Cognetti's 2016 novel of the same name, which won the Strega Prize and has since been translated into more than forty languages.

Luca Marinelli (Martin Eden) and Alessandro Borghi (Suburra) play the two leads from their twenties onward, with younger actors handling the boyhood scenes. Cinematographer Ruben Impens shoots the Aosta peaks in the boxy 1.33:1 Academy ratio, framing valleys and ridgelines as the film's third character. The Swedish-American songwriter Daniel Norgren, an outlier choice for an Italian-language Alpine drama, contributes the spare folk-rock score; the running time of nearly two and a half hours allows the friendship to unfold across decades.

The film won the David di Donatello for Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay in 2023, took the Magritte Award for Best Director the following year, and earned Impens a European Film Award nomination for cinematography. Sight & Sound and The Guardian placed it on year-end lists; Cineuropa and Variety singled out the central performances. It was widely embraced as one of the warmest entries in the recent Italian arthouse revival, alongside the work of Alice Rohrwacher and Pietro Marcello.