VERMIGLIO

Synopsis

1944. In Vermiglio, a mountain village where the war is a distant but omnipresent horizon, the arrival of Pietro, a soldier escaping the war, disrupts the dynamics of the local schoolmaster’s large family, changing them forever. The love between Pietro and Lucia, the eldest daughter, leads to their marriage and an unexpected destiny.

Statement of the director(s)

My father left us one summer afternoon. Before closing them forever, he looked at us with the big, amazed eyes of a child. I had already heard that when you get older you become a little child again, but I didn’t know that those two ages could merge into a single face. In the months that followed, he came to visit me in a dream. He had returned to his childhood home, in Vermiglio. He was six years old and had a toothless smile and the legs of a mountain goat and was carrying this film under his arm: four seasons in the life of his large family. A story of children and adults, amongst deaths and births, disappointments and rebirths, of their holding each other tight in the turns of life, and out of a community growing into individuals. Of the smell of wood and warm milk on freezing mornings. With the distant and ever-present war, experienced by those who remained outside the great machine: the mothers who watched the world from a kitchen, with newborns dying because of blankets that were too short, the women who feared they were already widows, the farmers who waited for children who never returned, the teachers and priests who replaced the fathers. A story of war without bombs, or great battles. In the uncompromising logic of the mountain that every day reminds man how small he is.
Vermiglio is a landscape of the soul, a “family saying” that lives inside me, on the threshold of the unconscious, an act of love for my father, his family and their small village. Travelling through a personal time, it wants to pay homage to a collective memory.