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“Vermiglio” will soon be streaming stateside. Maura Delpero’s Italian epic is set to debut on the Criterion Channel May 20, IndieWire can announce. The film will be later released on Blu-ray & DVD from Janus Contemporaries August 26.

“Vermiglio” is set in a remote Alpine village, where a strict schoolteacher’s (Tommaso Ragno) family is rocked by the appearance of a mysterious Sicilian soldier (Giuseppe De Domenico) who is fleeing the front lines of World War II. The family’s three very different daughters each find their lives transformed by the soldier’s presence across one year. Per the official synopsis, as the “four seasons marking the end of World War II, Pietro and Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), the eldest daughter of the teacher, are instantly drawn to each other leading to an unexpected fate. As the world emerges from tragedy, the family will face its own.” Roberta Rovelli, Anna Thaler, and Rachele Potrich also star.

The title of Maura Delpero’s second feature refers to a small Italian Alpine village. There is talk of war amongst the community, but at first it’s hard to place which war is being referred to. It’s actually 1944 and the war has taken most of the young men away, but this community seems entrenched in a distant past. The women are all kitted out in long skirts, there are few signs of electricity or motorised transport, the schoolchildren recite the Lord’s prayer in Latin, illiteracy among the adults reigns.

One of the village elders is Cesare Graziadei (Tommaso Ragno) and the story revolves around him and his increasingly large family. The film opens with the simplicity of the family’s rigorous morning routine, with chores being performed, milk going from cow to cup and each member getting an equal share. A sense of complete togetherness is implied.

Maura Delpero’s gorgeous historical drama “Vermiglio” may take place amidst the backdrop of World War II, but the existentialist themes that it examines are relevant to any era in which a culture is faced with a moment of change. Evolution does not mean the extinction of old ideas, but societal values tend to change when the next generation decides to reshape the values that were passed down by their predecessors. There are weighty themes like this at the center of “Vermiglio,” but what is most outstanding is that they are all filtered through the specificity of an intimate family drama. There aren’t any heroes or villains in “Vermiglio.” Delpero makes the case that even the most bitter of familial conflicts can be waged with compassion in mind.

At the center of “Vermiglio” is Cesare (Tomasso Ragno), a stern school teacher who takes it upon himself to maintain the...

Vermiglio is one of those great films that's hard to fully capture in writing, because it is and does so many things. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival (essentially second place) and is gaining steam as Italy's submission to the Oscars, which paints one picture. It's an indie box office hit in its own country, which paints another. It's artful, atmospheric, and observant; a slice-of-life film told in a hushed tone. It's dedicated to recreating a specific time and place and dropping us into it. There's a gentle steadiness to the way it moves.

Set in post-World War II Italy, Vermiglio explores the transformative journey of three sisters living in a small mountain village, prompted by the arrival of a soldier. The film chronicles their personal growth and the evolution of their relationships amidst the backdrop of a changing world.

Release Date December 25, 2024Runtime 119 minutesGenres DramaCast Santiago Fondevila,...

Like any system that operates along gendered lines, religious-based patriarchy works well so long as those under its control are content to be confined. For many, there’s a certain comfort that comes with limits and an adherence to duty—in, say, the mother taking care of the home, the father earning the keep, and the children understanding that a certain slavish devotion to obedience keeps them in their parents’ good favor.

Vermiglio’s images are keyed to the simplicity of that kind of domesticity. Here, children tend to the cows before the milk is warmed over the stove for breakfast. Cesare Graziadei (Tommaso Ragno), the titular village’s school teacher, reads the paper devotedly for news from the Italian front as his seven children play and do their daily chores, while his wife, Adele (Roberta Rovelli), dutifully—and, it seems, happily—goes about her duties at home with tender devotion.

Maura Delpero’s lushly told, moving mountainside World War II epic “Vermiglio” kept a low profile at the 2024 Venice Film Festival as one of a handful of Italian films in the competition. To some’s surprise — only because most eyes were on quote-unquote buzzier films like “The Brutalist” and “Babygirl” and “Queer” — this story of a repressed rural community upended by the arrival of a handsome stranger (Giuseppe De Domenico) won the Silver Lion prize, second only to the Golden Lion, from the jury led by Isabelle Huppert. Now, “Vermiglio” represents Italy in the 2025 Best International Feature Film Oscar race — and should land a spot on next week’s shortlist after nods from the Gothams and Golden Globes.

“I was happy when they nominated the [Venice] jury because of Isabelle, but also because of the other members,” Delpero told IndieWire of the filmmaker-heavy jury that included James Gray, Agnieszka Holland, Andrew Haigh,...

Writer/director Maura Delpero is capturing love in the time of World War II.

Delpero’s “Vermiglio,” which is the official Italian entry for Best International Feature at the 2025 Oscars, is set in 1944 Italy in the eponymous mountain village high up in the Italian Alps. As war looms as a distant but constant threat, the arrival of deserted soldier Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico) disrupts the dynamics of the local teacher’s (Tommaso Ragno) family forever.

Per the official synopsis, as the “four seasons marking the end of World War II, Pietro and Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), the eldest daughter of the teacher, are instantly drawn to each other leading to an unexpected fate. As the world emerges from tragedy, the family will face its own.”

Roberta Rovelli, Anna Thaler, and Rachele Potrich also star.

“Vermiglio” premiered at 2024 Venice, and was recently nominated in the Best Motion Picture, Non-English Language category at the Golden Globes.

Vermiglio is set in the eponymous alpine village during the waning days of WWII. Maura Delpero’s film, gorgeously shot by Leviathan cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, is a slow-moving fable that unfolds as a novelistic series of pastoral tableaus. The short chapters evoke Balzacian poetic realism and recall the sensual textures of last year’s The Taste of Things. But unlike that film, which exuded autumnal warmth and celebrated pleasure––therefore freedom––Vermiglio‘s stark, wintery beauty comes at the price of its characters’ desires. The painterly frames physically constrain subjects, especially women who suffer pointedly under the social restrictions of this time and place.

Its story meanders through the village but centers on a family of nine, especially the patriarch Cesare (Tommaso Ragno) and his daughters Lucia (Martina Scrinzi), Ada (Rachele Potrich), and Flavia (Anna Thaler). The central plot follows the courtship of Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a traumatized army deserter,...

With head bowed, over clasped hands, Italian director Maura Delpero’s quietly breathtaking “Vermiglio” 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. Far away, the Second World War is ending — an earthshaking event felt here only in abstract ways, because there’s the real labor of community and family to be getting on with, to say nothing of the private work of finding your own path to tread beneath those towering peaks. To those who live on their slopes, the mountains must be the beginning and end of everything, the amen on every prayer.

It is winter and a sleeping household, with two or three to a bed, gradually stirs. The eldest daughter Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) milks the cow, dreamily resting her face, which she has apparently stolen from a Vermeer painting,...