04/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: The Italian director chatted with us about motherhood, documentaries, fiction and the female outlook, and about Ermanno Olmi

(© Fabrizio de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

Maura Delpero’s first fiction film, Maternal [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Maura Delpero
film profile], was set in a home for teenage mothers run by nuns in Argentina. The director is now returning to the theme of motherhood with Vermiglio, The Mountain Bride [+see also:
film review
interview: Maura Delpero
film profile], a movie competing in the Venice Film Festival which is set in a mountain community in a Trentino valley during the final year of the Second World War, in the winter of 1944. The life of a large family is turned upside down by the arrival of a Sicilian soldier, potentially a deserter, who is seeking refuge and whom the eldest sister Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) falls in love with. The director met with Cineuropa to discuss the recurring themes in her work.

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Cineuropa: People who have seen your film say that it’s reminiscent of Ermanno Olmi’s work. How do you feel about this label you’ve been given?
Maura Delpero: I’m not unhappy about it - Olmi is wonderful, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is very close to my heart. They showed it to us when I was at school, it was one of my first cinema thrills. Obviously I carry it inside of me. I think the comparision refers to my working methodology, in other words opting to make the film with local people. I didn’t plan to make an Olmi-style film. I think you can see my own particular film language inside of this work, which is, naturally, the product of everything that came before me.

You come from the documentary world. How did your leap to fiction come about?
It was an organic transition. I realised that my documentaries were veering towards fiction. I was interested in playing on the limits between documentary and fiction, knowing how important the aesthetic is. My most recent documentaries had a fictional flavour to them, whereas this film has a documentary air, because it explores things which have their roots in the land.

You directed non-professionals, including children, in this film. How did you find this experience?
It was brilliant maintaining a child’s outlook, but they often descend into comedy and they can say things that we, adults, would never say because of our excessive social filters. We wanted there to be a kind of choir in the film, which talks about and comments on the events taking place under the covers, in the dark of night.

Did your father’s death encourage you to seek out your family’s roots?
Before my father’s death, those were places I didn’t hear from too often. Suddenly, I felt the need to return and talk about them. It was interesting rediscovering them with fresh eyes; a different, more adult outlook. I’d also become a mother so I felt like the family and generational line was continuing. I started to ask questions of the mothers, the grandmothers: who was there before me? Where do I come from? In what direction did my personal story take me?

Compared to your previous film, Maternal, there’s a strong and contradictory male character in your present work: the father. But your focus remains on the female viewpoint. Is this essential given that you’re a woman director?
In retrospect, I think it’s a good thing to place focus on the female viewpoint in films, given that they’ve often been pushed to one side. But, ultimately, I wrote what I felt deep down. In my two previous films – both documentary and fiction – there weren’t any male characters, but there was a huge, off-screen male contingent, a noisy absence. In this film, there are the men who didn’t go to war. Obviously, there’s also what I’m most deeply familiar with: nocturnal chats between girls, that moment when you grow and you understand that you’re a woman or that you’re still a child. Things experienced in such a visceral way that it’s natural they’re communicated by fingers on a keyboard while I’m writing.

Because of the choices she makes, the protagonist, Lucia, gives us a glimpse of what the figure of the modern-day woman might become.
It was interesting for me to depict that particular period in history, because it was a time of transition between ancient and modern, when a woman became a woman of the future out of necessity. They’re not feminist ideas about emancipation - these come later. It’s because, in some sense, Lucia is surviving the victimisation she suffered in that community. And it’s thanks to motherhood that she takes back control of her life. Her daughter is a hope for the future for her, a future which might also be wonderful. She realises that children can be a blessing. Motherhood is another theme which recurs in my films without me knowing. They’re complex kinds of motherhood, but they always help characters to overcome hardship and to grow.

(Translated from Italian)