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Tag: Vermiglio

  • ‘Vermiglio,’ Maura Delpero’s Venice Silver Lion Winner, Acquired by Sideshow and Janus Films for North America

    ‘Vermiglio,’ Maura Delpero’s Venice Silver Lion Winner, Acquired by Sideshow and Janus Films for North America

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    Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights to Maura Delpero’s intimate epic “Vermiglio,” which recently won the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize. 

    The drama, which is set at the end of World War II in an Alpine village where the arrival of a soldier causes disruption in the dynamics between three sisters, subsequently had its North American premiere in the special presentations section at Toronto.

    Sideshow and Janus Films plan to release “Vermiglio” theatrically in the coming months, they said in a statement.

    In her Variety review, critic Jessica Kiang called “Vermiglio” “quietly breathtaking,” going on to note that the film “unfolds from tiny tactile details of furnishings and fabrics and the hide of a dairy cow, into a momentous vision of everyday rural existence in the high Italian Alps.” 

    Venice jury president Isabelle Huppert praised the Silver Lion winner for being a war story in which you never see war. “It’s like you have a great offscreen subject matter, but you get to see what’s going on only through a small eye, through the latch of a door,” she noted at a press conference after Venice’s awards ceremony.

    In an interview with Variety prior to the awards ceremony, Delpero revealed that “Vermiglio” is her most personal film and “stems from grief for my father’s death,” she said.

    “Vermiglio” marks Delpero’s follow-up to her first feature “Maternal,” which takes place in an Argentinian refuge for teenage mothers run by nuns and made a splash on the festival circuit.

    The North American rights deal was negotiated by Sideshow and Janus Films with Anonymous Content’s Nick Shumaker and Charades’ Carole Baraton, on behalf of the filmmakers.

    The “Vermiglio” producers are Francesca Andreoli, Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli, Delpero and Santiago Fondevila Sancet. The film is co-produced by Carole Baraton, Pauline Boucheny Pinon, Jacques-Henry Bronckart and Tatiana Kozar. “Vermiglio” is a co-production between Cinedora and RAI Cinema and is also co-produced by Charades Production and Versus Production, with the participation of Anonymous Content.

    Sideshow and Janus Films said in a statement that they were “deeply moved and impressed” by “Vermiglio,” which they called “a new Italian classic that is intimate in scale but epic in scope.”

    “Maura Delpero has made an unforgettable portrait of a family and especially the women as they navigate their way in a world that is about to change forever,” they said. “We could not be more excited to introduce this film to American audiences in theaters.”

    At Toronto, the company is presenting Gints Zilbalodis’ animated adventure film “Flow,” which bowed in Cannes, went on to win four trophies at Annecy and has been selected to represent Latvia in the best international feature category at the Oscars; Payal Kapadia’s Cannes Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light”; Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia”; and Jia Zhangke’s “Caught by the Tides.” They will also be launching Leos Carax’s “It’s Not Me” at the New York Film Festival next month.

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    Nvivarelli

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  • ‘Vermiglio’ Review: Maura Delpero’s Personal Tale Of Wartime Infidelity In The Italian Alps – Venice Film Festival

    ‘Vermiglio’ Review: Maura Delpero’s Personal Tale Of Wartime Infidelity In The Italian Alps – Venice Film Festival

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    The setting for Maura Delpero’s second feature is a sleepy wartime village in the Italian Alps, but the languid nature of the film is so soporific it borders on anesthetizing; indeed when the credits finally roll, it might be worth checking yourself for scars and other signs of organ harvesting. Technically, it is a marvel of period filmmaking, an immersive view of la vida rustica so bursting with authenticity that it may inspire more enthusiastic viewers to put on a folk hat and get a job in a heritage museum working the spinning jenny. Others may not be so gripped by its drawn-out drama; box-office blockbuster material it is not.

    The year is 1944, and the war in Europe is still in bloom, with no end in sight. The center of Vermiglio, the village that gives the film its title, is the local school, which is presided over by the ever-so-slightly draconian but certainly patriarchal head teacher Caesar (Tommaso Ragno). Being the father of nine children, with another one on the way, means that a fair proportion of his charges are his own brood, although not all live up to his exacting standards. Some, he is sure, will go on to bigger and brighter things. The others will be condemned to a life of domestic or rural drudgery, like his daughter Ada (Rachele Potrich) and son Dino (Patrick Gardner). Dino especially gets his ire, causing his wife to admonish him: “It’s not his fault he’s the teacher’s son.”

    Caesar’s Cheaper By the Dozen homelife is established early on, with the children packed three to a bed, and Delpero frequently returns to his offspring as kind of naïve Greek chorus. Like the Von Trapp family, they are plentiful and age-diverse. One of the youngest gets excited after receiving “two tangerines” on the feast of Saint Lucia. The eldest, Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) — who could be 16 going on 70, given the prematurely ageing qualities of rural life — finds her head being turned when her soldier brother Attilio (Santiago Fondevila Sancet) returns from the war with his new friend Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico) in tow.

    Pietro is from Sicily, with an accent some find hard to understand. He is also illiterate, which Caesar tries to deal with by including him in the adult classes he sets up at the school. The fact that he speaks very little doesn’t seem bother anyone at all: “Men who come back from the war have secrets,” someone says. “It’s like their tongues have been cut out.” Pietro is quick to register his affection for Lucia, however, passing her notes that begin as a hand-drawn hearts and, after a bit of schooling, quickly become rudimentary declarations of love.

    Lucia falls for him and the pair marry, which, dramatically speaking (though we don’t yet know it), is perhaps the defining moment of the film. When he subsequently disappears back to Sicily, and radio silence ensues, it’s a source of anxiety — but mostly on behalf of the family, who worry about Lucia’s mental health as a war widow (“Without a man, the wheels start to come off”). Although it is very much concerned with the limited choices facing the women of Vermiglio, Delpero’s film is also about the presence — and absence — of the men in their world. Pietro’s vanishing act is simply seen as a side effect of the conflict, and no one judges him for it. They simply wait, and wait, and wait.

    Who Pietro really is, and why he’s actually missing, is arguably what the film is leading up to, but we find out about his polyamorous ways in the same way that Lucia does, from a newspaper. In narrative terms, it’s frustrating, but, in a subtle way, it does fit with what Delpero is trying to say about this world: the people of Vermiglio are not stupid (most of the children can read), not incapable of sophistication (Caesar likes Chopin and Vivaldi, and believes music to be “food for the soul”), and not incurious (they pore over maps and discuss other countries and continents); they are simply disconnected and isolated in a beautiful snow globe, in a world that is about to change around them, its innocence shattered.

    Title: Vermiglio
    Festival: Venice (Competition)
    Sales Agent: Charades
    Director/screenwriter: Maura Delpero
    Cast: Tommaso Ragno, Giuseppe De Domenico, Roberta Rovelli, Martina Scrinzi, Orietta Notari, Carlotta Gamba, Santiago Fondevila Sancet, Rachele Potrich, Anna Thaler, Patrick Gardner, Enrico Panizza, Luis Thaler, Simone Bendetti, and with Sara Serraiocco
    Running time: 1 hr 59 mins

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    dmorgan1201

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