Vermiglio (Criterion)

Secrets swirl beneath the surface of a remote Italian community in Maura Delpero’s exquisite wartime drama, winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize. In a majestic Alpine village touched only faintly by the upheavals of modern life, a strict schoolteacher’s family undergoes a profound shift when a relative returns home with a mysterious Sicilian soldier, both fleeing the front lines of World War II. As the seasons change across a single year, three very different daughters of the sprawling Graziadei clan will find their lives transformed. Blending historically grounded realism with painterly grace, Delpero draws from her own ancestral history for Vermiglio, an at once intimate and momentous vision of a world suspended between the patriarchal past and the stirrings of a new future.