Maura Delpero’s The Mountain Bride – Vermiglio was the winner of the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is a film of austere beauty, as fragile as it is forceful. Set in the Trentino village of Vermiglio in 1944, it conjures a community perched on the edge – geographically at the border of Switzerland and Austria, historically at the close of World War II, and spiritually at the uneasy threshold between tradition and change.

Delpero, whose father was born in Vermiglio, creates a portrait that is at once intimate and choral. The teacher Cesare (a riveting Tommaso Ragno) presides over his large household, where daily rituals – prayers, lessons, chores – unfold with clockwork inevitability. His eldest daughter Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) is drawn into a tentative romance with Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a Sicilian deserter sheltering in the village. Their marriage, fragile in its promise, sets off a sequence of tragedies that exposes both the resilience and the rigidity of a community already frayed by scarcity, prejudice, and the silent weight of unspoken rules.

What is most striking about the film is Delpero’s treatment of silence. Characters speak in whispers, their words muffled as though by the snow itself. The first smile appears only halfway through the film, and by then the viewer has absorbed the pervasive chill – physical, moral, and spiritual. The snowy landscape, filmed with crystalline precision, functions as both mirror and metaphor: dazzlingly beautiful yet unforgiving, it frames lives defined by hunger, loss, and the ever-present spectre of sin and repentance.

Vermiglio belongs to the lineage of Italian folk cinema – its kinship with Ermanno Olmi is evident and acknowledged – but Delpero’s vision is marked by restraint rather than abandon. She eschews overt dramatics; war remains off-screen, felt more as absence than spectacle. Instead, she builds a poetics of survival, tracing the razor-thin line between endurance and collapse, between the rigid codes of honour and the furtive gestures of love.

The film’s power lies in its refusal of resolution. Rather than offering catharsis, Delpero insists on carrying through: on showing how life persists, even when scarred by loss, hypocrisy, or prejudice. For viewers of a certain generation, Vermiglio will resonate with the war stories told by grandparents – accounts at once harsh and tender, ordinary and epic. Delpero transforms this legacy into cinema that is both raw and sublime, a meditation on community and constraint, where beauty is inseparable from sorrow.

Samuele Carrino as Andrea Spezzacatena (courtesy of Italian Film Festival)

Margherita Ferri’s The Boy with Pink Trousers (Il ragazzo dai pantaloni rosa) is a tender and devastating retelling of a real tragedy: the story of Andrea Spezzacatena, a fifteen-year-old Roman boy who took his life in 2012 after enduring relentless bullying and cyberbullying. Adapted from his mother Teresa Manes’s memoir Andrea: Oltre il pantalone rosa, the film is less a biopic than a work of empathetic testimony, placing Andrea’s fragility and courage at the heart of its narrative.

Andrea (Samuele Carrino, in a remarkable performance) is presented from the outset as a boy of brightness and sensitivity. A gifted singer and pianist, he wins a coveted place in the papal choir, where he encounters Christian (Andrea Arru), a repeat student whose charisma masks his cruelty. Their relationship oscillates between friendship and betrayal, setting the stage for the humiliations that later escalate online. Alongside them, Sara (Sara Ciocca) offers Andrea companionship and loyalty, though her solidarity proves insufficient to shield him from the merciless dynamics of adolescence amplified by digital exposure.

Ferri resists sensationalism. Instead, she crafts a film that is luminous in its aesthetics, with Martina Cocco’s cinematography bathing Andrea’s world in warmth even as the story darkens. The pink trousers of the title – once red, faded by a mistaken wash – become both symbol and stigma: an emblem of individuality turned into a weapon by those eager to enforce conformity. A school prank gone cruelly wrong culminates in Andrea’s public humiliation and, later, the cruelty migrates to social media, where anonymous torment metastasises into unbearable pressure.

What distinguishes The Boy with Pink Trousers is its refusal to flatten Andrea into a mere victim. Ferri and co-writer Roberto Proia insist on his complexity: playful, ironic, searching for beauty, and brave in his difference. His parents (Claudia Pandolfi and Corrado Fortuna) are portrayed with painful authenticity, caught between helpless love and the inability to protect. The soundtrack, anchored by Arisa’s award-winning ‘Canta ancora’, deepens the film’s poignancy without tipping it into sentimentality.

In Italy, where adolescent suicides linked to bullying are on the rise, Ferri’s film could not be more urgent. Yet its resonance is universal. It is a searing reminder of the costs of indifference, and a plea for compassion in an age when cruelty can be multiplied at the click of a button. The Boy with Pink Trousers is cinema as quiet resistance, asking us to listen to the silences that precede tragedy.

La Grazia (courtesy of the Italian Film Festival)

Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia (‘Grace’ in English, but also ‘Pardon’) is a return of breathtaking assurance. The film opened the 82nd Venice Film Festival and won Toni Servillo the Best Actor prize. It is, at once, political parable, love story, and metaphysical meditation. It is also Sorrentino at his most delicate and mature, reasserting his voice after the faltering Parthenope.

Servillo inhabits Mariano De Santis, a fictional President of the Italian Republic approaching the end of his mandate. Admired for his rectitude – nicknamed ‘reinforced concrete’ – he is nonetheless assailed by doubt. Two petitions for clemency confront him with moral knots: a woman who killed her abusive husband, and a man who ended his wife’s suffering from dementia. He is also asked to sign a law on euthanasia, a decision that would shape the future of countless lives. Hovering over these dilemmas is the film’s most urgent question: Who owns our days? Is it the state, the law, the church – or are our days ours alone, to end or prolong? And what of the last season of life, when time itself feels borrowed?

Mariano’s daughter Dorotea (an extraordinary Anna Ferzetti) urges him towards decision, while his grief and suspicions about his late wife’s fidelity gnaw. Politics, duty, and intimacy collapse into one another, revealing how the highest office can be undone by the most private of agonies.

The film’s title crystallises its doubleness. Grace, yes – but also pardon, reprieve, an opening to forgiveness. Sorrentino’s script moves with this doubleness, asking what it means to grant clemency, to oneself as much as to others. Mariano’s solitude is cushioned by pomp – the gilded interiors of the Quirinale Palace, framed like Renaissance canvases – but these splendours mock rather than soothe. Not for a moment does one envy his cocooned existence.

Visually, La Grazia is a gallery of moving paintings: the countryside where Mariano first meets his wife recalls Luigi Ghirri’s photographs; a slow-motion sequence of the Portuguese president battling rain across a red carpet evokes Bill Viola’s video art. Sorrentino indulges his familiar surreal flourishes – a Pope with dreadlocks, a robot dog, a veterans’ choir – but without pomposity. This is a filmmaker freer, more playful, yet also more restrained than in earlier films, able to achieve sublimity without excess.

Soundtrack choices underscore this blend of gravity and levity: bursts of hip hop and electronic music pierce the stateliness, as if to remind us that even marble institutions rest on fragile rhythms of doubt, desire, and joy. By its end, the film leaves us not with answers but with a tear-smile – heartrending but never despairing.

La Grazia is not simply about a president, but about all of us: our burdens of love and loss, our compromises with truth, our yearning for grace. And still that question lingers: Who owns our days? A masterpiece, beyond magic and beauty, it confirms Sorrentino’s cinema as a form of freestyle poetry, rap in images: sublime, inexhaustible, unforgettable.