Original title: Le otto montagne
2023/24 Season Membership: £70 / Guest Tickets – £12 (both available on the door)
Italy/Belgium/France/UK • Drama • Year: 2023 – Running time: 147 mins
Languages: Italian, English, Nepali
Audience Response: 16 slips returned
- ‘Excellent’: 13 votes
- Breathtaking scenery, and excellent storytelling. Would Bruno have been so single minded had he spent a year studying in Turin?
- Truly wonderful film. Totally absorbing. Beautiful scenery. Wonderfully natural actors.
- The 4:3 Academy ratio was a great choice for portraying the wonderful mountain scenery. Sympathetic acting & direction – lovely
- Good story; fab scenery; beards!
- Very novelistic, beautiful scenery
- Best so far. Good to have a film with detailed relationships, stunning camera work & attention to detail.
- Hypnotically absorbing from the first to its very last minute. Beautiful photography and deeply affecting.
- Really enjoyable film. The acting, scenery & story were tremendous.
- Beautiful chronicle of the ebb & flow of two lives. Thought provoking but not challenging to watch.
- Great, bit long though!
- Touching. Very good.
- ‘Very Good’: 2 votes
- So good to spend an evening in the beautiful mountains! Again! Super film.
- ‘Good’: 1 vote
- Lost its way about 75% of the way through & then less interesting. Enjoyable to look at.
- ‘Satisfactory’: 0 vote
- ‘Poor’: 0 vote
Read the comments left here, or visit our “The Eight Mountains” discussion page
Synopsis:
A movie with air in its lungs and love in its heart: a story of friendship, shot in the beautiful Aosta Vally of the Italian Alps.
Based on Paolo Cognetti’s book of the same name and Jury Prize Winner at Cannes 2022
The framing of every shot is exquisite and the sense of place and time, the steepness and prospect of the mountains, the snow and freshness of spring are palpable.
John Bleasdale (Sight & Sound)
Directors: Felix van Groeningen • Charlotte Vandermeersch
van Groeningen: Beautiful Boy (2018) / The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012)
Writers: Paolo Cognetti • Charlotte Vandermeersch • Felix van Groeningen
Main Cast:
| Alessandro Borghi | Bruno Guglielmina |
| Luca Marinelli | Pietro Guasti |
| Alex Sassella | Bruno’s Father |
| Elena Lietti | Francesca Guasti |
| Filippo Timi | Giovanni Guasti |
| Lupo Barbiero | Young Pietro |
| Cristiano Sassella | Young Bruno |
| Andrea Palma | Teenage Pietro |
| Francesco Palombelli | Teenage Bruno |
(for full cast list, additional technical information and reviews, please visit The Eight Mountains pages in IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes)
CFC Film Notes
Holidaying with his family in the Aosta valley in the Italian Alps in the mid-1980s, 12-year-old Pietro befriends local boy Bruno, and they spend an unforgettable summer together in the valley. But when Pietro’s father, Giovanni, suggests that Bruno should return to Milan with them to study, he inadvertently drives a wedge between the boys.
In adulthood, Pietro drifts away from his parents, whilst Bruno finds a surrogate father figure in Giovanni, who returns to the valley each summer. It is only after his father’s death, that Pietro realises he has missed out on knowing his father at his happiest and most fulfilled. Retracing his father’s steps Pietro is reacquainted with Bruno, they renew their friendship and together they embark on a project that may help them bridge the lingering emotional crevasse.
Adapted from the 2016 novel by Paolo Cognetti, it’s set in the pristine, cathedral-like Alpine valley of Aosta, including the slopes of Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn – though the ‘eight mountains’ of the title refers to the peaks of Nepal: a symbol of overarching ambition and conquest.
In adapting Cognetti’s bestseller, Belgian husband-and-wife team; writer/actress Charlotte
Vandermeersch and director Felix van Groeningen (The Broken Circle Breakdown) have created a rich and suitably novelistic world, full of details slowly accrued in a way that mimics the ancient glacial landscapes of its setting. Featuring breath-taking cinematography by Ruben Impens, The Eight Mountains is a real achievement, a quiet, subtle and compelling study of an intense and transformative friendship and a look at how nature enters the soul.