We interview director Maura Delpero about her film Vermiglio, the inspiration behind the movie, the depiction of the past, the use of regional dialects, and more.
Set in the titular town of Vermiglio in 1944, Vermiglio portrays the reality of the Second World War in a remote mountain village in northern Italy through the lives of a local family, with a particular focus on the eldest daughter Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) who goes through marriage and motherhood over the course of the film. When Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a deserter who was originally from the south of Italy, arrives in town, everything changes for both the main family and the town of Vermiglio.
After winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival where it premiered, Vermiglio was later nominated in the Best International Feature Film category at the Golden Globes and was also chosen as the Italian entry for the Academy Awards. We sat down with director Maura Delpero to talk about her new film, the inspiration behind it and how she chose to use the regional dialect. Read our interview!
Maura Delpero on how she decided to tell the story in Vermiglio
First things first: how did you get the idea to make Vermiglio?
Maura Delpero: It comes from a personal inspiration. After the death of my father, I had a dream that he came to visit me, but he came as a little boy. He looked like a photo of him that I was very familiar with . In my dream, he was playing with his siblings – my aunts and uncles – in the house where they were born, in the little village of Vermiglio. I began to follow this vision of the children playing during the last year of the Second World War.
It was very interesting to follow these people who I knew very well, but to see them as kids. It was a mixture of something I knew very intimately but I was also ignorant about; because I did not know them when they were so little, this invited me into their world. And then, after being in their world, I realised there was something interesting there that has to do with the bigger history, beyond a personal family story. It is a moment of change after the war when the world turns to a modern society, with the focus shifting from the villages to the cities and from the community to the individuals.
Vermiglio begins with a full bed and ends on an empty one: we start with this unity of bodies and souls but at the end everyone is alone. I thought this societal change from community to individual was interesting to explore, especially in a little isolated village because it allowed me to study human beings and their relationships.
On depicting the past in Vermiglio and how it relates to our present
In Vermiglio, you recreated the setting and atmosphere of a small town in Northern Italy at the end of the Second World War, something that many of us might not have known about before watching the film. How was that for you from a writing and directing point of view?
Maura Delpero: It was always inside me. These images, stories and memories that I had in my mind from my childhood were waiting for the right moment to be found and explored. I think it was David Lynch who said that a great story is like fishing, and I think that is true: you have stories inside you, and you have to fish them out.
I think my father’s death opened the door to these memories that I was not ready to explore before. The roles changed, then: I became an orphan and then became a mother. I really switched from daughter to mother. It’s like I had opened a door inside me and all that material was inside.
In a way, when it came to this rural mountain world, it was already inside me. It was not really shown or spoken about either in Italian cinematography or in the international one. That was also an advantage for me because it was an untold story. We see a lot of the south of Italy or the centre and of the cities and seaside but I don’t think the audience knows a lot about that part of Italy, which is also beautiful.
War is really important in the film, but we don’t really see it directly. Why did you choose to see the film during the Second World War and depict it like that? And how important was it for you to comment on such a specific moment in Italian history?
M.D.: First of all, I wanted to talk about the people who are not in the history books. We are used to seeing the epic side of war, with the winners, the blood, and the battles. But there was also the war lived by ordinary people in their kitchens and in their little villages. That too was the war when people were waiting for their loved ones to come back, trying to raise children and keep going with their life. A lot of that is not really told and it was important for me to portray this unspoken aspect of the Second World War. I also thought that it was a transitional moment that could talk to us today because it seems that the events of the past can help us understand the present today.
Some of the issues you show in the film, like the divide between the South and North of Italy, speak to the reality of the time. How did you work on portraying that and did you want to make a commentary on the present?
M.D.: Everything was very far away at the time which in Italy seemed like an enormous distance. The dialects also created a divide between people because Italians didn’t understand each other. We were only able to have a common language with the arrival of television in the fifties. At that time, someone coming from Sicily was on the one hand a stranger and very dangerous, and on the other exotic and fascinating.But Pietro is also just one of the young boys who was thrown into a war bigger than himself. He is not evil or a villain, he is just another victim of the war. In Vermiglio, he is not welcomed in the village due to racism [against people from the South] and yet he is the one who helps the family, not the locals. This makes you question the racist ideas of the time that some of the characters embody. It is the same with the teacher: he says “if only everyone would be a coward, there would be no war,” which shows his anti-militaristic sentiment.
Maura Delpero on the use of dialect in the film
I am not sure if the English-speaking audience noticed this as well, but I found the use of language really interesting because you use the regional dialect in Vermiglio. Was it always your intention to showcase it, and how did you work on that?
Maura Delpero: I thought a lot about it. Of course, the use of dialect is going to have a much clearer and more direct effect on the Italian-speaking audience, but I think that indirectly and subliminally it also arrives to the international audience. They can feel that there is a special music or rhythm to the way the people talk, or even in the way the mountain people move and how they only talk very little. Unlike the stereotypical image of Italians, they are not talkative. This, much like the dialect, is part of their identity. Even now, they don’t talk in Italian.
Do they still speak in dialect today?
M.D.: Yes, still today! They do speak Italian in schools and official situations but with family, it is just the dialect. That remains the emotional language of the people of the region. In Vermiglio, it would have been artificial for me to have the characters speak in Italian. I knew the use of the dialect would lead to having subtitles, but I had to do it: it is about the internal music of this town and its people.
On how the film may resonate to an international audience outside of Italy
Generally speaking, Vermiglio is very specific to Italy – and Northern Italy, really. How do you think this movie can also resonate with international audiences outside your home country?
Maura Delpero: When the film comes out, it becomes the audience’s film. Of course, it is my movie but other people sort of appropriate it. It’s a beautiful thing. I do films that leave a lot of space for the audience to find their own story because of their personal experience, that is what I like. I think the magic of filmmaking is in how people find elements that resonate to them. Sometimes you don’t know why and sometimes you do because you worked on it.
For example, at the beginning of this project, I had to understand how to make sure that Vermiglio would become universal, and not just a private story. And I found that there were a lot of universal themes – life, death, desire, or the struggle for auto-determination – that would resonate all over the world. I think it is also interesting to watch such a very specific moment in a very specific part of the country because it was a poor and tough side of Italy. It is not grand with famous brands or expensive cars, but it is the poor Italy that had to emigrate to Australia, Chile, Argentina or the United States. And that was just recently in our history. In a way, why wouldn’t it be resonating to someone on the other side of the ocean if we all come from the same roots?
It is not just geographically, but I also asked myself whether this love story could tell us something. After all, what is the difference between Lucia waiting for a letter that doesn’t come and a contemporary girl waiting for a WhatsApp? There is no difference, you are still waiting for something. Now we wait less, but it is still the same anxiety and this makes everything universal.
Maura Delpero on her experience in documentary filmmaking and how it translated to the making of Vermiglio
You did a lot of work in documentary filmmaking before Vermiglio. How do you think that influenced the way you approached fiction in this film?
Maura Delpero: It influenced the ethical approach and the accurate detailed representation of reality. Of course, it would have been different if I had made a science fiction film, but Vermiglio is inspired by and rooted in reality, so my approach was as accurate as it would have been if I had been doing a documentary. This meant studying a lot, meeting a lot of people, and starting from the place. It was really about looking for things in the location itself rather than coming in with ideas from outside. Working in documentary filmmaking made me stricter with myself – I was always very careful not to make the story too fictional – so it was very good training, because it set the bar really high.
There are a lot of non-professional actors in Vermiglio. Why did you choose to do that and how did you find the exact people for the film?
M.D.: It is strongly linked to what we were saying before. Sometimes in fiction they use some actors just because they are famous rather than for the character and you can feel it. I can tell especially in period films and I didn’t want this distraction for the viewer. I am very strict with professional actors when it comes to ordinary people in rural areas, they have to really immerse themselves into that world, otherwise, I go to real-life people.
I think you have to do it if you want the authenticity, even if it is so radical. It is difficult, of course. You have to cast a long time before and have a lot of patience but then again, I had a lot of training from documentaries. I had to convince a lot of people because they didn’t want to be part of the film at the beginning, but now they are so happy! It is also complicated to mix professional and non-professional actors and make everything work together. It is a lot of work but then also a lot of satisfaction.
A lot of Vermiglio focuses on this family and their relationship feels very real and authentic. How did you work on that dynamic with the actors and the people you cast?
M.D.: I started casting years before. At first, I started alone and then with Santiago [Fondevila], one of the producers. We rehearsed a lot during the casting, so it became their world, and some weeks before the film, we organised meetings with the actors. They started having breakfast together, and sleeping together, but they were already friends and already a family. They also live near each other in the valley so they ended up meeting autonomously. It was not just about the single characters but more about the unity that is so central to the film and creating that family and that relationship on screen. It was a lot of work but then when the camera was there, they already had their own world and had the relationships built already.
On the inspirations behind Vermiglio and how they influence the timeline of the film
In many ways, Vermiglio reminded me of Italian neorealism with the use of non-professional actors and the on-location shooting. How much of the film was inspired by the Italian cinema that came before it?
Maura Delpero: When I was working on the film, I watched some neorealist films that I particularly liked but in a way, I think my greatest influence was the documentary experience. Of course, the two are linked because Neorealism has a documentary-like attitude. Paintings were also a big inspiration for Vermiglio.
Was there any painter or specific artistic movement that inspired you the most?
M.D.: Mostly Giovanni Segantini’s winter paintings. But also Flemish paintings and some artists of the Romantic era, like Friedrich and Courbet. That is why the camera is fixed and never out of focus: it almost looks like a painting. It really set the aesthetic of the film because I also wanted a sort of painted texture that did not feel too sharp, too defined, or too digital, so that drove our choice in terms of lenses in order to make the audience feel like they were in a huge painting.
The film takes place over the course of one year and seasons are such a big part of it. How did you work on that and what do the four seasons mean in Vermiglio?
M.D.: Seasons have always been used in the rural world to determine the passing of time. It is not about how many days or years have passed, but the focus is on the season within the year. It is about feeding your kids, what the earth can give us depending on the season, and how you can protect yourself from the cold. At the same time, the seasons allowed me to talk about the personal history of the family and at the same time about the bigger history of the war ending and peace beginning. Paradoxically, that is the beginning of the family’s loss of peace, so for them it goes the opposite way.
The seasons are also so visible in the high mountains that you can really see the passage of seasons and this allowed me to have an elliptical narration that pushes the story forward. There are so many events happening simultaneously and a lot of things changing quickly, so the seasons helped the audience understand the timeframe and the passing of time.
Maura Delpero on why she chose to focus on children and women as the main characters in Vermiglio
What role do the children play in Vermiglio and why are they so important in the film?
Maura Delpero: I love children because of their point of view on the world, which we tend to lose when we grow up and become productive people in society. I think we gain this depth again when we are old. Children have a fascinating point of view on other people’s lives, almost as if they knew their secrets, and they witness both the sweet and harsh elements of that society. It was important for me to give them a voice in order to show how they look at the world around them. It is also because they had a lot of children in the past and there were always kids around.
If kids play a big role in Vermiglio, the same can be said for women. How important is it for you to focus so much on the female protagonists, especially as a woman filmmaker?
M.D.: To be honest, it was very instinctual and also from experience from my personal life and childhood. As a daughter of a mother, I felt it was a strong necessity. I also politically and ideologically believe that we should put women at the centre of films because there is such a huge under-representation. Motherhood, for example, is not represented in depth, we never see its complexities and its importance as a life-changing event. After all, we are all here thanks to motherhood so for me it has to be a big part of my films.
On the upcoming award season and what it means for Vermiglio
What does something like the Golden Globe nomination and winning the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival mean to you and to the project of Vermiglio as a whole?
Maura Delpero: I was so happy about the Grand Jury Prize! First of all, the jury at the Venice Film Festival was amazing; I really look up to all of them, so I was already very happy that they watched it at all. The Silver Lion, of course, was a beautiful achievement. That is when things started happening, some of which I did not expect. I was not very familiar with the Oscars until now; I am just getting to know them, and it is very interesting to me how it relates to another part of the world.
The Golden Globes are very exciting as a recognition because they only spotlight six international films. [This is more prestigious] compared to the Oscar shortlist [which features 15 titles]. It helps Vermiglio catch up [in the award conversation] because it is a relatively younger film, as it premiered a few months ago in Venice. The visibility that the Golden Globes gave the movie will make more people watch it.
Speaking of the Oscars, Vermiglio was chosen as the Italian entry for the International Feature Film category this year. How did you react to that, and did you expect it at all?
M.D.: Well, if they had told me many months before, it would have been very unexpected. I would not think of being nominated because I was less known. While I did a lot of documentaries before – and documentaries, as a whole, are always spoken about less, which is a little unfair I think – this is only my second fiction film. But then the Silver Lion of course is what made the Oscar nomination more likely. I started seeing it as a possibility after hearing what people were saying as well and Vermiglio was talked about as one of the favourites.
Maura Delpero on her future projects after Vermiglio
Did you think about what you are going to do after Vermiglio? Do you have any future projects you can talk about?
Maura Delpero: There are a lot of things going on, but I have to focus on the award campaign. It is such a big effort: I finished a film with a very little baby and at first, I was thinking I would get to rest a little bit, refresh, and then begin another project. And then this really beautiful thing happened with the Oscar nominations and award season, but it is a lot of work. It is also a physical effort with travelling around and jet lag because of different time zones. And when I stop even for one second, I spend time with my daughter. For now, I have my hands full, but at the same time, there are personal projects I hope to pursue.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Vermiglio will open in cinemas in the UK & Ireland on 17 January, 2025. In the US & Canada, the film had a limited release on January 3, 2025 and is now available to watch in select theaters.
Header Credits: Maura Del Pero (Romina Guarda, La Biennale di Venezia) / a still from Vermiglio (Modern Films)
