‘Vermiglio,’ Maura Delpero’s Venice Silver Lion Winner, Acquired by Sideshow and Janus Films for North America
variety.comNick Vivarelli International Correspondent Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights to Maura Delpero’s intimate epic “Vermiglio,” which recently won the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize.
The drama, which is set at the end of World War II in an Alpine village where the arrival of a soldier causes disruption in the dynamics between three sisters, subsequently had its North American premiere in the special presentations section at Toronto.
Sideshow and Janus Films plan to release “Vermiglio” theatrically in the coming months, they said in a statement. In her Variety review, critic Jessica Kiang called “Vermiglio” “quietly breathtaking,” going on to note that the film “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.” Venice jury president Isabelle Huppert praised the Silver Lion winner for being a war story in which you never see war. “It’s like you have a great offscreen subject matter, but you get to see what’s going on only through a small eye, through the latch of a door,” she noted at a press conference after Venice’s awards ceremony.
In an interview with Variety prior to the awards ceremony, Delpero revealed that “Vermiglio” is her most personal film and “stems from grief for my father’s death,” she said. “Vermiglio” marks Delpero’s follow-up to her first feature “Maternal,” which takes place in an Argentinian refuge for teenage mothers run by nuns and made a splash on the festival circuit.
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