Few things are as common yet as earth-shattering as love and death. Maura Delpero’s “Vermiglio” explores these core human experiences in all their thorny complexities. In this remote Italian village in the alps, where time seems suspended in air, they intermingle with human life as seamlessly as the townsfolk blend into the vastness of the mountains they inhabit.
The first Italian film directed by a woman submitted as Italy’s entry for the Oscars in nearly twenty years, Delpero’s portrait of a family on the edge of modernity unfolds like a dense novel. Set during the waning days of WWII and inspired by stories from her own family, “Vermiglio” follows the aftermath of the arrival of an outsider, Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a Sicilian deserter with a secret, who falls in love with the family’s eldest daughter, Lucia (Martina Scrinzi). As their romance develops, Delpero weaves in and out of the lives of Lucia’s family, including her schoolteacher father Caesar (Tommaso Ragno), her perpetually pregnant mother Adele (Roberta Rovelli), her sisters Ada (Rachele Potrich) and Flavia (Anna Thaler), her brothers, her aunt, her cousin, her neighbors, and many other inhabitants of this tight-knit village.
Born in Bolzano, Italy, Delpero studied literature at the University of Bologna and the Sorbonne before studying film at the Professional Training Center of SICA in Buenos Aires. Interested in exploring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, she began working in documentary. Her first two documentaries, “Signori Professor” and “Nadea e Sveta,” premiered at the Torino Film Festival. The latter was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature at the 58th David di Donatello Awards. After researching hostels for single mothers run by nuns in Argentina known as hogars, Delpero wrote and directed her debut narrative film “Maternal,” which premiered in competition at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival. The next year Delpero received the Kering Women in Motion Young Talent Award. Her latest film, “Vermiglio,” debuted in competition at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Silver Lion. It also played in competition at the Chicago International Film Festival, where it won the Gold Hugo Award.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Delpero over Zoom about finding the texture of small villages, using sound and visuals to follow character arcs, the influence of Romantic period paintings, exploring sisterhood and queerness in the past, and how much of our lives are lived in our beds.
The village of Vermiglio is almost its own character as you film in and around this beautiful, remote mountain place. How much pre-production scouting did you do to really figure out how you wanted to tell the story of the village?
I wanted the village to be as local and as universal as possible because I think that it was very important to be as precise as possible in depicting it, but at the same time, feeling that this could be one microcosm, one Huis clos, one little village in the world, with all the typical dynamics of the little villages and the typical places that are always the same. The houses, the church, the bar, the place, and the faces you always recognize are the same. Therefore, I chose every extra one by one because extras become characters, because you get to see them, even if you don’t realize it, but they’re really always the same faces that you meet at parties, and it’s like life at villages, no?
Yeah, I grew up in a small town, so I completely understand that.
I’ve worked with the same editor for years, Gian Luca Mattei. He’s from Naples. This is completely different from Vermiglio, but he always said, “Oh, there’s exactly the same dynamics of my little village.” Like the separation between men and women. Also, this sensation of claustrophobia is like what happens to Lucia when tragedy comes. A little village can protect you, but it also can judge you a lot. So, if she had chosen to stay in the village, she would have been very victimized, and she chooses to go alone in the city to begin life again without a spot on her, without being tainted now.
But of course, I did a lot of research. When I write a script, I always try to go to the territory; even for documentaries, I do this. I always go there because I want to be exposed with the five senses to everything. It really influences, and also it’s very creative, and you catch little details and you them in the script, which you often didn’t even imagine. But then they become so important because they talk about a culture. Isolated villages like Vermiglio kept their culture. Some tourist places in the valley are more similar to the city, but a village like Vermiglio is another thing. It’s another dimension still even now. That is also why I chose non-actors from the zone for many of the characters; I knew they could be far away from contemporaneity thanks to their being from that place.
I love the way that the sound pre-laps a lot in the film, where you’re hearing a previous scene as the next scene happens, or you’re hearing the animals outside, but the film is inside, but you’re always a little bit outside at the same time. I’d love to hear how you built your world through that use of sound editing.
I really like the off, both in visual and audio. I think it adds a lot directly and subliminally. And I said to the sound designer that we would use a lot of direct sounds, so we recorded a lot of direct sounds, and then we worked with many layers to understand this big difference between the inside and the outside. Because up in the mountains, especially in that period when you didn’t have heating outside, the inside was a completely other world. Inside is a protection from death. You could die from the cold. At the same time, inside is really inside, because they have big, big walls.
So in a way, you feel that you are then in a capsule. So we worked on this, and as you noticed, we worked overall in the editing room on this idea that the sound should be like a chain between one scene and the other to have them more intertwined. Because having a multi-character movie and following a lot of characters, but at the same time being this individual part of a community, what happens to someone directly influences the other person and the other story inside and the other sub-stories. So, I felt that intertwining this way could be a way to give a sense of community. We also tried to work on the image separated from the sound. For example, someone always talks about someone you see in the image. That is something that happens in big families. Now, there’s always someone talking about you or commenting about you. You don’t really have privacy, and you’re always part of a community that is judged, inside and outside.
We did the same thing with music. Music is completely diegetic. It always comes from a source. For example, the classical music always comes from the gramophone. But sometimes we anticipate it, or sometimes the scene after inherits the music from the scene before. There was this idea of not having a soundtrack because I felt that this word had the big silence that we should repurpose: all these sounds of nature and interiors. Then we had classical music coming from the gramophone and the songs of the men of the town. You hear these songs from the same man you see in the bar. They are the singers of this town now. They keep on doing this tradition. And, of course, the Vivaldi, like everything, is rooted in respect to the origin, and at the same time, it metaphorically works with the story and the four seasons. Chopin, of course, was a choice that depended on the fact that a man could receive those discs at that epoch, but only the famous ones would arrive. But at the same time, I also love the fact that Chopin had stories of suffering love stories, that he suffered for love and fell in love with the wrong person. So, there are a lot of layers that you work on.
You have this very complex family with so many children. The mother mentions she has been through ten births, but you only see eight children who live. Two have passed, including the one who passes in the film. As you were working on the script, did you create a family tree to decide who these characters are going to be and what their emotional arcs are going to be within each other?
Yeah. I have to say that it was really difficult to keep in mind all the bellies because sometimes, when you structure the script and then in the editing room, you sometimes change things, but we were very limited. Sometimes, you can’t change a scene because a character is not pregnant anymore. I remember that early on in the project, I studied the genealogical tree of my family. I really love to see where we come from and imagine who they were, what life was like, and how it could have been another thing if they had married another person. I always had my grandmother in mind with the mother in the film because it’s just two generations away. I always saw her in the kitchen, never stepping out of the kitchen. Knowing that she had been pregnant for 20 years is so difficult for us to understand, and at the same time, it’s just my grandmother.
I also like the idea that back then, it was easier to accept that life is bigger than us, and can be very tragic and that they can die. That war makes death quite normal and quite okay. If one dies, there’s another one. To us, it is really difficult to accept. Now, we try to control a lot of life. So when death happens, it’s a tragedy. At that time, there was an acceptance of the fact that nature is bigger than us. We are little. We also tried to refer to this photographically because the references I passed to Mikhail Krichman, the DP, were mostly Romantic period paintings, where often the men and the women are very little in front of the enormity of nature, which is completely indifferent to men because she does her might.
There is a really sad but beautiful line where Lucia talks about how she gathers elderberries to make it into a crown for their dead siblings because children love them. It’s a tradition they have because there’s so many dead siblings, and it’s really depressing, but she doesn’t say it in a depressing way. It’s just, like you said, a natural thing. I know your father is from this region, so I was wondering how many of those kinds of traditions came from your family and how many did you discover while you were researching?
When I began to write, I kind of reconnected with something that was inside me, but I didn’t think about for many years. I discovered that there was a lot of material inside me. It’s interesting, because that material you absorb when you’re a child, and that you absorb in a very strong way, is because you don’t have filters or protection when you’re a child. When I went to interview old people, and they were talking to me about their traditions, it raised something inside me. So it was a little of both. It was remembering like, “Ah, yes, of course. I remember that! I remember they asked me to do the elderberries.” But it’s things that you have inside you more in the unconscious. Of course, then I also discovered things. I appreciate doing interviews directly with people because you get to know the same things you could read in the books, but sometimes you get to know very little things and with a lot of emotions and personal filters that give you the tone of the film.
You mentioned how you remember your grandmother always in the kitchen. In the film, you see these very distinct women from different generations. Also, the girls are all very different; each has their own desires, but they’re not really respected. But they also have all these questions as they age into womanhood, but the older women aren’t helping them. Like, when Flavia (Anna Thaler) has her first period, and her mother just hands her a pad and says, “Flip it when it’s dirty,” then walks away. As a viewer, you’re like, okay, she needs more information than that! I’d love to hear what you were hoping to show about the way that women are with each other in different generations.
That moment in which Flavia has her period relates exactly to what we were saying about sound and family. Everything is intertwined. So you’re an individual, but also what happens to your sister or brother strongly influences your life. So, probably, she goes to the mother to talk to her, but the mother is completely absorbed in what is happening with Lucia, who is giving birth without wanting to give birth. Everybody is completely alone in the house. The father is depressed. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone. The mother now has to deal with two babies. She has to breastfeed two babies, so all the other children are mostly alone. Flavia tries to talk to the mother, then she goes to talk to the father, which is quite modern. But also because the father is a strange character between modernity and antique, like how he chooses her as the one who will study and give her this privileged relationship. She feels that she can go to him thanks to the relationship.
But I also think there is a sisterhood, and there is a sisterhood throughout the film, until the very end. When Lucia goes to Sicily, she goes there to find a killer. But she just finds a lonely mother. So there’s kind of a sisterhood between these two women in this square. They’re just understanding each other, being both widows with children. I think there is a lot of sisterhood in certain limitations and certain difficulties. Of course, it was not conceptualized then. Now, we conceptualize it. We are talking about a world that doesn’t conceptualize these things, nor feminism, nor sisterhood. But it is there. For example, Flavia, the one who is elected to go study, says that when her sister Lucia is in bed in this Mantegnan Christ situation, she doesn’t want to go anymore. She wants to stay there to help Lucia with her baby. But of course, she dreams of going to the city to study.
And Ada (Rachele Potrich), who could take advantage of this moment because, of course, she envies her sister and she would have loved to be the one to go to school, she’s honest and tells her she has to go. She doesn’t think, “Okay, maybe if she doesn’t go, I can go.” I think there is a sisterhood. But then, society is bigger than sisterhood. So, for example, Aunt Cesira (Orietta Notari) is not bad; she loves her nieces, but society is bigger. And so when it is the time to console Lucia and say, “Poor girl, I will help you. We will be strong.” Instead, she says, “Ah, you’re bad. No one will want you. You trust too much.” Just a lot of judgments because she was born into that society, a society that has taught her to think that if the man is not there, the wheels come off the car.
When she said that I was like, “Oh no!”
It’s deeply rooted in her because she was raised with these machist ideas. But of course, in the film, you see that through generations, there is this transitional moment in which those girls will begin to be the girls of the future with their own determination. This full bed at the end is an empty bed because everyone will be more lonely and more emancipated at the same time.
I love the scene with Ada where she’s looking at the naked pictures and says it will be her last time, and then she’s like, “This one doesn’t count!” because she’d already seen it. Where did her queerness come from when you were developing these characters? You don’t often see a lot of characters like her at all in films set in the past. I think she’s amazing.
I cherish her a lot because it was difficult to write her. She has mostly interior conflicts, but at the same time, I think she has such human struggles that you can empathize with. I always thought that we don’t have to forget that even though she is very mature because life asks her to be mature and she has to take care of the other babies, she has to accept the fact that she’s not loved and everything, we shouldn’t forget that she’s still a child. So, when it comes to looking at naked photos, she then acts like a child. When we discover sexuality, we are children. But I think it’s interesting to think about the different auto-legitimation of sexuality between the different genders. She shares that book with her father; of course, he doesn’t know it, but for him, it costs the time of a cigarette, but for her, it costs terrible punishment.
I was a little inspired by an aunt who wanted to be a nun and could never be because she had to cherish the babies they always give to her. I always asked myself about her sexuality, and so I began to fantasize about her sexuality, thinking that probably the world had never understood her and that she was hiding secrets. Of course, everyone is hiding secrets about sexuality even now in 2024, but at that time, for a woman, it was something that you could not even mention. And so I was imagining as a way to understand. They didn’t have any references at that time, so she also didn’t really understand what was happening to her. When I think about her, I think about this phrase by Emily Dickinson: “Silent volcano.” To me, she is a silent volcano. So I think we empathize with her because always in life, there’s a moment in which we’ve felt ourselves like outsiders, and she’s a complete outsider. That’s why she has this relationship with Virginia (Carlotta Gamba), who’s also an outsider.
Virginia is also an amazing character. I love that actress. She was so natural.
Yeah, she’s great. Virginia also seems mature, but she’s also a child and an orphan of the war. Her mother hits her; it’s not like an expression, and she would love to be elsewhere, and everyone’s judging her. So, between her and Ada, there are these two lonely people who meet. I like that Virginia has the power in that relationship because she’s older and more sexy. But in the end, when she leaves for Chile, it is Ada who has the courage to hug her so that there is an evolution in their relationship and power.
The camera fluidly moves through the world between the indoor and outdoor settings. The wagon pulls back when Pietro leaves, but the viewer doesn’t know he’s on a wagon until it pulls back. Can you talk a bit about what you discussed with your DP in terms of capturing this world?
The references I sent him were mainly paintings rather than from other films. I told him that this is a painted film. Also, I was trying to develop a cinematic language that is very elliptical, so I asked to work with very few shots. Every shot had a little less because I wanted to arrive at a kind of syncretic image in which you see a lot of things within that image, and you don’t have to talk a lot. So the stillness of the camera came from these painting references, and also from an idea of another time period, not a contemporary, genetic time.
Of course, there were moments in which we decided to go another way. Like the marriage, which shakes Lucia’s life, and also Pietro’s departure, where we decided to have this disrupting sensation. Because you don’t know as a viewer what is going to happen, I decided to put the viewer in a status as ignorant as the one the family is in. But some things can make you subliminally understand that this could be a turning point.
That jolt in the departure scene is amazing. Obviously, the film bookends with a shot of the family in bed and then a shot of an empty bed. So many of the conversations throughout the film happen in the beds. A lot of decisions happen in these beds. Lucia’s bed, in particular, goes through a lot. I would love to know when you realized beds would be such a big symbol in this film.
I’m very attached to the bed, also personally, because my ideas come from bed. The moments in my life in which I felt very bad, I went to bed. It’s really a place for the human being. Overall, now that we are always asked to be up, the bed is really the place where you connect to the most intimate and you can be sincere in a way, with yourself or with others. And at that time, beds were also something shared. I was very fascinated by this. My father told me he didn’t have a personal bed for many years. A bed was something that you shared. And this, I always thought, is really a relationship that is rooted in the body. It’s not just your brother; he is also the person whose feet are on your cheek every night. That bonds you in a very irrational and unconscious way.
It comes out of necessity, out of poverty and cold. But it changes relationships. I realized that it’s a world in which you cannot say a lot of things, but the whisper should be a sound in the film. And at this moment in the night, yes, you are allowed to say some things in this secret world, and the others might not listen. Here, you can say the questions that you dare not otherwise, and in the moment, you have this freedom. This world is a children’s world.
And of course, it’s not just the children’s world. You see the men and the women during the day. The women of the time are silent, accepting the patriarchy, but then when it’s time to go to bed, for example, when they struggle, when they have this fight, you see it is the father who becomes a little child. The way he embraces his wife, it’s like he turns into a little child, and now she is the mother of the eleventh child. You see that she is the one to whom he confesses his fears and doubts, as in the scene where he confesses his concern that they have not received a letter from Pietro. Of course, he said it was all okay to his daughter. Don’t worry. He wouldn’t share his real worries with his friends at the bar. The woman is the person to whom men confess the real complications of their problems. You can see this only in bed because it’s the moment when they really are sincere.
So, I love the idea that the same places would come again and again, as we talked about with the village. The same places in the house become changed by the story, like Lucia’s bed that begins the film. It is a bed for sisterhood, but it’s also a bed for marriage and illness. These visual changes pass by the viewer, and through them, they understand the evolution of the story.
Are there any contemporary women filmmakers or filmmakers in the past who have inspired you as an artist or that you think readers should seek out?
I remember I felt so bad when I first desired to work in cinema, because there was a moment in which I realized that all the people I was referring to were men. It was really because at that time we didn’t talk about the gap. But now we do, and it was like an epiphany, realizing all the directors were men. So I have to say that, unfortunately, a lot of my references were men. There were some films by women, but I also didn’t know a lot about women directors. There were some famous ones. I love the first films by Jane Campion like “An Angel at My Table” and “Sweetie,” and of course “The Piano.”
For example, I learned about Chantal Akerman’s films very late. No one told me about her, her films were not very spoken about. I also love Agnès Varda. But I realized I knew so few and thought this was incredible. It has to do with the exact nature of exclusion in society. I come from literature, and there, sometimes women changed their names, but there were definitely more women writers. I think this is because it was more accepted in society that women could. Also, it’s less powerful, there is less money. But I think in the film it’s changing, fortunately, now in the two countries where I live, Italy and Argentina, I have a talk that will come out soon with Alice Rohrwacher. I was so happy to share with her because there is mutual recognition. In Argentina, I have to say that it’s getting better and better, quantitatively, much more than in Italy.
In particular, there is Lucrecia Martel, of course. I also founded with some friends an association called Cartelera TransFeminista, which is a feminist group of women and trans directors. We are quite a bunch and it’s made changes. For example, you get to the national awards, you arrive and you see now that there is more representation than before. So it’s changing. I really hope for the next generation, that it will change.
“Vermiglio” is in limited release now, opening at the Siskel Film Center in Chicago on Friday, January 3rd.