Vermiglio

Maura Delpero's Vermiglio won the Silver Lion (the Grand Jury Prize) at the 81st Venice International Film Festival in September 2024, the festival's second-highest honour after the Golden Lion. It was Italy's official submission for the 97th Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category and made the December 2024 shortlist of fifteen, although it did not advance to the final five.

The film is Delpero's second feature, after the 2019 documentary-fiction hybrid Maternal, which had premiered at Locarno. Vermiglio is partly autobiographical: the village of Vermiglio in the Trentino region of north-eastern Italy is Delpero's own family's place of origin, and the central narrative (a large Alpine Catholic family in the closing months of the Second World War) is loosely based on stories from her grandparents' generation. Delpero spent over four years researching the project, including interviews with surviving residents of the actual village.

The cast is composed almost entirely of non-professional Italian actors recruited from Vermiglio and the surrounding Val di Sole communities; the leads include Tommaso Ragno, Roberta Rovelli, Martina Scrinzi and Orietta Notari. The dialect work (Trentino Italian, with substantial passages in the local Solandro dialect) was preserved on screen and subtitled into standard Italian for international release. Cinematography is by Mikhail Krichman, the Russian DP best known for his long collaboration with Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Leviathan, Loveless), an unusual production decision that drew significant attention to the film's distinctive Alpine winter visual register.