Maura Delpero is an Italian filmmaker born in Bolzano, Italy. After brief studies in Literature at the University of Bologna and the University of La Sorbonne, she studied Film at the Professional Training Center of SICA in Buenos Aires. Delpero’s first two films, the documentaries “Teachers” (“Signori Professori”) and “Nadea and Sveta” (“Nadea e Sveta”), premiered at the Torino Film Festival in 2008 and 2012, respectively. For the latter, Delpero was nominated for the David di Donatello for Best Documentary Feature at the 58th David di Donatello. In 2019, Delpero’s feature film debut “Maternal” (“Hogar”) premiered in Competition at the 72nd Locarno Film Festival, where it received a Special Mention and was awarded the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. The film was inspired by Delpero’s own experiences as a teacher in Argentine “hogares,” homes for teenage mothers often administered by nuns. The following year, Delpero was awarded the Women in Motion Young Talent Award, presented by Kering and the Cannes Film Festival. In 2021, “Maternal” earned Delpero a nomination for Best New Director at the 66th David di Donatello.
Tara Karajica spoke with Maura Delpero at this year’s European Film Awards about her sophomore feature, “Vermiglio,” that premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize. “Vermiglio” is set in 1944, high in the Italian Alps where WWII is a distant yet omnipresent reality. But the arrival of a fugitive soldier disrupts the dynamics of the local schoolmaster’s family. Across four seasons, the love between the soldier and the eldest daughter, Lucia, leads to an unforeseen destiny. The film was nominated for European Film and European Director at the 37th European Film Awards, is nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and is the Italian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.
I understand the film was inspired by a dream.
Maura Delpero: One night, I had a dream about my father coming to visit me. But he came to visit me as a child, not the father I used to know. He was a six-years-old boy, and he was playing in the house in Vermiglio. It was really a vision. He was playing with his siblings – my aunts and uncles. I began to write about those kids playing in those places. And, I found, from the very beginning, that it was very interesting to write about people you know very well, but in a moment in which you couldn’t have known them because you hadn’t been born yet. They were my guides to that moment. So, I thought that it was interesting because they could allow me another point of view on my family [from which] to look at people I saw as big when I was a kid and there was now a reversal of roles – me as an adult, and [them] as these little kids. But also, they were introducing me to an era, to the years of the end of WWII because I felt from the very beginning that that period could be interesting because it could be a very recent past that could still tell us a lot of things. It was the past, but it was still our yesterday.
What is your relation with Vermiglio and its region?
M.D.: My father was born in Vermiglio. My father and all his family. It was a ten-kids family, a mountain family. So, for me, it was the town of my father and my grandfathers. And, we had a house there. The house where they all were born is still there; this old house with big stone walls.
Can you talk about the specificity of the region in a wider Italian context?
M.D.: Yes, we are really a regional country because we have a sense of unity – of Italian unity. But then, there are some specificities that have to do with the dialect, with the traditions that we tend to keep alive. They still just speak in dialect there, for example. So, the choice to do it in dialect was compulsory because I was asked: “Why don’t you do it in Italian so that you don’t have to have subtitles.” But, for me, it was really artificial because people don’t speak in Italian, at least not the language of feelings. You speak Italian at the post office, at school, but then you go home and to say, “I love you,” you say it in dialect. So, since it’s a relationship movie, it should be in dialect and, of course, yes, it has to do with the very deep knowledge you have. So, when I began to write, I discovered that I had a lot of material inside me that I had absorbed during childhood and that I had kind of let go for many years.
That region is also important because of the resistance during the war. The North and the South are very different, which is also shown in the film.
M.D.: So, what Lucia does is really something pioneering for a woman of the epoch. She wouldn’t have done this if not out of necessity. She is on the verge of death. She’s completely killed. And, it’s her way to face reality. But what she does is something very modern for a woman. She starts as a country girl, very far away from us, and she ends up being a city woman that has to say goodbye to her baby and go to work. She’s really a metonymy of this society that is a transitional society.
The film works beautifully on this metaphorical level that you mention. Can you expand a little bit on the women, the sort of becoming yourself. How important was it for you to show that in such a complex way, the road that we all go through?
M.D.: I really feel that it’s the road we began in that moment, and you can see it very well, the difference between the mother and the daughters. The mother doesn’t discuss the status quo. It’s okay. She never steps out of the kitchen. She never thinks. She just raises her voice to defend her boy and the father, he’s completely shocked by this. And, the justification for the father is that you have to be crazy out of childbirth to raise your voice. We see that these daughters are already a new generation. There’s something boiling in there for auto-determination. You see that they are attached to the codes of the period, but they are already longing to become individuals.
It’s also a word in general that comes from communities going to individuality in the good and the bad sense. But I think about a character like Ada, for example, the middle sister, her ending is in the codes of the epoch, because cluster was one of the possibilities of women. But the way she does it is a way to find her own freedom. Paradoxically, in that cluster, she finds her possibility to study, to smoke. She wouldn’t have had that freedom if she had married. So, in a way, she finds a “room of her own,” as Virginia Woolf would call it. And, she’s much, much closer to the father than the father understands. But then, at the same time, you see through the film how difficult it was and how really there was inequality between the genders. If you think about Ada, she shares erotic material with her father – the same book – even if he doesn’t know. But for him to look at that book means it’s time for cigarettes, and for her it means an enormous punishment. It really talks about the auto-legitimation of desire. It was really a woman thing – feeling a sexuality was really like: “What am I daring to feel?”
Again, they are our yesterday. To me, it was interesting to look back, because I always think about my grandmother. I mean, because between her and me, there is a revolution. If she could see me now, she wouldn’t understand what I’m doing. So, in a way, you say: Okay, something enormous has changed.” At the same time, for me to be here with you has cost a price in the dialog with my grandmother inside me that was saying: “Why don’t you stay in the kitchen, having children?” So, subliminally, she’s still there.
Your screenwriting process has several layers – a story and an approach influenced both by fiction and documentary. How did you go about writing such a multilayered story?
M.D.: This film was born as a novel, and I really felt the sensation of this journey to go to the other character, and because I really felt that I was telling the story of a family. And, a family is a community. Of course, it’s individuals, but it’s also intertwined with the people who influence each other. It’s difficult in Cinema, in a script because these chamber movies are really challenging because you really have to keep the emotion of the viewer on different characters. If you look at script manuals, the bibles of scriptwriting, they always talk to you about the path of the hero. There’s always this dominant point of view. And, I have to say that also, in the end, in the previous film, I privileged a multi-point of view. I felt it was a stability. It’s also a political status. I prefer plurality. And, I think if you do it well, in a way, it gives you the possibility to deepen the same theme, looking at different points of view.
Going back to your inner dialog with something connected to your history, to your grandmother, is there any dialog that you have, for example, with female directors?
M.D.: When I began, I realized that all my role models were not women. I began twenty years ago, and it was like counting them on my fingers. So, of course they talk about Ermanno Olmi because, also because the North of Italy was not very told. So, if you now do a film about Mafia, you have a lot of examples in the past to talk about. But if you talk about modern Italy and rural parts, there weren’t a lot of films [about them]. So, in a way, I think it was also that the reason, but, of course, it’s a reflection. Cinema is a reflection of society. Things are changing slowly, but I really remember when I began, it was the sensation of choosing a male job.
I know that dreams are important for many creators in all different ways. How does your relationship with dreaming and the whole dream space look like?
M.D.: Specifically, in this film, it was something that never happened to me, because that dream I was talking about before was a vision. It was really strong. Also, it had never happened that my father passed away if we’re talking about something that is capital in the life of a human being. So, this change of roles in my life and my big loss, I think made me more open to the lyric. Personally, my creative moments are linked to the state of dormiveglia. This state in which you’re not sleeping, but you’re not awake either. It’s a transitional moment. It’s a limbo and that moment, to me, is really creative.
It’s a connection to your unconscious. And, in general, what I do as a creative process is put myself in a position to be as near as possible to my unconscious, because it is there that I pick up things. Because if I put myself near the computer and think: “Okay, what do I write about that character?” just stereotypes will come out. I try to put myself in a listening position. I try to listen from the inside. And then, of course, I use structure a lot. For example, if you have this ensemble movie, there’s a lot of structure in there: there is the structure of the season, the structure of this turning point in the middle of the film, the fife with Pietro, the life without Pietro. A lot of decisions that I have to make: Does the viewer know more than the family? Or is he or she as ignorant as them? A lot of technical structuring, but the source has to do with the unconscious.
When we are watching the film, it’s a film about the past, but do you think the new generations will cherish it, take care of it as well as you did, as well as our generation?
M.D.: I really hope so. I think that our problem as a society is that we lose History. I strongly believe in education and public education. I think the key is there. And, I while I was doing this film, I was reflecting on how much we tend to forget. It’s incredible. I mean, this film talks about Italy two generations ago. It’s a poor country that had to emigrate, and now we are the first in the world in terms of brands, and we look at immigrants and say: “Come on, it’s yesterday!” So, I think it’s important to keep on looking back.
Photo credits: European Film Academy.
This interview was conducted at the 2024 European Film Awards.
