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One night, Pietro tells him about a Nepalese he met who described how the world consists of eight circular mountain ranges divided by eight seas, and at the center of it all is Mount Meru, the tallest mountain. Pietro asks Bruno whether the person who has visited the eight mountains and eight seas is more learned than the person who has scaled Mount Meru. Bruno identifies himself as being on Mount Meru and Pietro claims to be visiting the eight mountains and that he is more knowledgeable.
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At Cannes, critics praised the film’s attention to detail and the way it used elements of nature to conjure the feelings of magic that childhood friendships can create. It’s been a long time since Pietro has seen Bruno too; like so many childhood friendships, theirs faded as the two grew up and went their separate ways. The house is soon finished, and over time it becomes a place for them to reunite every summer, a high-altitude oasis amid lives often adrift in confusion and uncertainty.
Review: ‘The Eight Mountains’ is already an art-house hit — and an emotional powerhouse
There are moments when these ravishments come close to the touristic, though this is attenuated by the filmmakers’ unexpected use of the boxy Academy ratio. Here, this square framing has the old-fashioned quality of early still photographs, particularly in some of the opening scenes, which avoids the postcard-like associations these landscapes might have had in wide-screen. These early scenes are intoxicating, partly because it’s very pleasant to watch happy children just be happy together, and this is an especially stunning place to explore. Like Pietro, you are immediately plunged into the region’s splendors and mysteries, its densely sheltering foliage, enigmatically abandoned corners and dramatic, seemingly limitless vistas.
Interview: Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch on The Eight Mountains
A mention of the Tibetan sky burial ritual echoes later on; twice, a life-and-death moment is relayed in the prosaic detail of hazard lights blinking on a car pulled in to the side of the road. Early in the process they met with Paolo Cognetti who lives six months out of the year in the Alps. “He showed us around a lot of the locations that serve as inspirations for this book,” he said, so in the end they shot the Italian portion of the film, which is also shot in Nepal, near to the writer’s Alpine abode. An epic journey of friendship and self-discovery set in the breathtaking Italian Alps, The Eight Mountains follows over four decades the profound, complex relationship between Pietro and Bru... Susan Keesler shares with us a glimpse into her favorite room design, along with how this family room was inspired and came together with beautiful springtime shades.
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Felix, do you see that approach to music as similar to your other films? I always think about your use of “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof in Beautiful Boy, which at first had me skeptical but eventually won me over with its sincerity. Since you mentioned the music, how did you settle on your approach to using it in the film? There’s a real earnestness to the way it accompanies the action you depict, especially in montage, where so many filmmakers can use it as ironic or removed commentary on the action. Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch enter a new stage of their partnership, both professional and personal, through their co-direction of The Eight Mountains.
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He also learns that in his absence his father has continued to see Bruno. Eventually he finds Bruno in the mountains where his father has left a pile of rocks and wood on a slope intending to build a house. It becomes clear that while Pietro was alienated from his father, his father had become closer to Bruno.
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Vandermeersch, primarily known for her work as an actress, had previously appeared in several of her husband’s other movies and received a screenplay collaboration credit on his Oscar-nominated The Broken Circle Breakdown. But as Van Groeningen began to approach shooting the adaptation of Paolo Coginetti’s novel that he’d co-written with his wife during pandemic lockdowns, he suggested that she join him in helming the film. Based on the award-winning Italian bestseller “Le Otto Montagne” by Paolo Cognetti, the movie is novelistic in the best sense. It immerses you in the world of its characters – both human and Alpine – on that chimingly deep level that usually only literature can access. But it lives and breathes in beautifully cinematic terms, with each one of Ruben Impens’ stunning academy-ratio pictures worth a thousand words. Although this classic bildungsroman may have been nipped and tucked in the transition from page to screen, in terms of scale and sweep and emotion, little appears to have been lost in translation.

Cannes jury prize winner 'The Eight Mountains' finds US home - Screen International
Cannes jury prize winner 'The Eight Mountains' finds US home.
Posted: Tue, 12 Jul 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Think where man’s glory most begins and endsAnd say my glory was I had such friends. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies. Charlotte, have you been back in front of the cameras since working behind them? I’m curious if having served as a director has affected at all the way that you approach being an actress.

Charlotte wanted to further develop her design skills and received her graduate degree in Interior Design and Architecture from the Parsons School of Design with honors. She also spent time working for the esteemed interior design firms Pembrooke & Ives and David Scott Interiors. Being around since 2010, their signature style is all about emphasizing color and fresh patterns. They want to influence spaces while helping people feel the space and what it’s all about. This native has essentially been considered the “face of interiors in Charlotte.” This is also literal as she’s been on the front cover of Charlotte Magazine for two consecutive years.
In an interview with the directors, Van Groeningen said they were very moved by the characters in the book, which he called “a simple story, an epic really, set against a beautiful backdrop” that spoke to him directly, with elements “That were very very personal to me,” he said. Designed for a young family with ties to New York, this whole home design is just what the clients had in mind—modern but warm and functional for their daily life with two young children. Anne Buresh shares with us a glimpse into her favorite room design, along with how this family room was inspired and came together to create timeless serenity. Feeling dissatisfied with his aimless life, Pietro decides to reinvent himself by visiting Nepal.
In the months since, that disconnect has been playing in my head on a loop, and it’s come to feel like a metaphor for my own distance from the readers I write for — a distance I try my best to close with every review, every essay and, yes, every list like this one. One of the necessary privileges of being a critic is the opportunity to see new movies early, sometimes a week or two before they’re released (in the case of most studio pictures), and sometimes months in advance at film festivals. This year, my NYFF duties meant seeing more than a few major movies in unfinished form, which made them all the more intriguing to revisit later, with fresh eyes, when the time came to actually write about them. For both boys, their friendship proves a soul-sustaining connection, one that begins with them dubiously eyeing each other in Pietro’s dark, claustrophobic holiday home but that rapidly shifts once they dash outside. They walk, race and tumble through the area, exploring and sharing.
The story begins in the summer of 1984, when 11-year-old Pietro and his parents, who live in Turin, spend the summer in a small Alpine village. It’s here that Pietro meets Bruno, a boy roughly the same age, who swiftly becomes his friend and guide. The region, with its scenic lakes and jaw-dropping vistas, is a boundless sun-drenched playground. And the writer-directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch joyously capture the boys’ rambunctious, rough-and-tumble innocence, the pure happiness we see coursing through their faces and bodies as they run, wrestle, yell and explore.
Time is given to allow us to soak up the atmosphere, and to get to know the familiar slopes in different weathers, at dawn, dusk, winter, and summer. Music plays almost throughout, sometimes a long keening note, with muffled percussion underneath, creating an eerie, lonely feeling. They're made up of time spent, of being mindful and thoughtful towards your friend and ensuring to stay in touch, even with the distance between them. Memory looms large in “The Eight Mountains,” nearly as large as the craggy peaks that fill the frame and offer a misleading explanation of the movie’s title (which it shares with its source material, a 2016 novel by Paolo Cognetti).
Bruno is a confident, physically vigorous child who can scale the side of a stone building like a goat scampering up a rock face. He’s being raised by his aunt and uncle — his mother is missing in action, his father works abroad as a bricklayer — and is the only child in his village, its population having dwindled, as in other rural areas, to a ghostly near-dozen. But what finally lifts “The Eight Mountains” above those earlier films is a generous, gently unassuming worldview — one that grants everyone their space and their struggles, and that never turns characters into easy symbols or reduces relationships to obvious tensions.
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