Italian Film Festival In Lebanon – VERMIGLIO

The Italian Embassy to Lebanon and the Italian Cultural Institute in Beirut, in partnership with the Metropolis Art Cinema, have the pleasure to announce the opening of the First Edition of the Italian Film Festival in Lebanon.

The Festival will open on January 24^th, 2025 at the new Metropolis Cinema in Mar Mikhael (Beirut) with the Mena premiere of the movie “Vermiglio” by Maura Delpero, winner of the Grand Jury Prize of the Venice International Film Festival.

The Festival will end on February 2nd, 2025

VERMIGLIO (119 min., Maura Delpero)

In four seasons nature completes its cycle. A girl can become a woman. A belly can swell and become a creature.
One can lose the path that led safely home, one can sail seas towards unknown lands.
In four seasons one can die and be reborn.
Vermiglio tells of the last year of the Second World War in a large family and how, by a paradox of fate, with the arrival of a refugee soldier it loses its peace at the very moment in which the world finds its own.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES:

My father left us one summer afternoon. Before closing them forever, he looked at us with the big, amazed eyes of a child. I had already heard that when you get older you become a little child again, but I didn’t know that those two ages could merge into a single face. In the months that followed, he came to visit me in a dream. He had returned to his childhood home, in Vermiglio. He was six years old, he had a toothless smile, the legs of a mountain goat and was carrying this film under his arm: four seasons in the life of his large family. A story of children and adults, amongst deaths and births, disappointments and rebirths, of their holding each other tight in the turns of life, and out of a community growing into individuals. Of the smell of wood and warm milk on freezing mornings. With the distant and ever-present war, experienced by those who remained outside the great machine: the mothers who watched the world from a kitchen, with newborns dying because of blankets that were too short, the women who feared they were already widows, the farmers who waited for sons who never returned, the teachers and priests who replaced the fathers. A story of war without bombs, or great battles. In the uncompromising logic of the mountain that every day reminds man how small he is.

Vermiglio is a landscape of the soul, a “family lexicon” that lives inside me, on the threshold of the unconscious, an act of love for my father, his family and their small village. Travelling through a personal time, it wants to pay homage to a collective memory.

Opening night is FREE for all! (First come, first served)

Program’s movie titles