THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

LE OTTO MONTAGNE

Title: Le otto montagne
English translation of title: The Eight Mountains
Year of release: 2022
Directors: Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch. Felix van Groeningen also directed such films as De helaasheid der dingen / The Misfortunates (2009) and Beautiful Boy (2018).
Screenwriters: Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch
Country of Production: Italy
Genre: Drama
Length: 2 hours 27 minutes
Language: Italian
Availability: A blu-ray is available, with English subtitles.
Principal boys: Cristiano Sassella and Lupo Barbiero play young Bruno and young Pietro respectively. The portion of the film featuring these boys, which is on-topic for this Archive, constitutes the first 32 minutes.

Synopsis
In this beautiful and philosophical film, Pietro, a boy from the city, forms an intense bond of friendship with mountain boy Bruno, whom he meets whilst his family is on holiday in a village in the Italian Alps.

Years later, after the death of his father, Pietro returns to the mountains and meets up again with Bruno. Pietro becomes a writer, and travels to Nepal, where he meets his future partner Asmi, a schoolteacher. Bruno, meanwhile, has found his home in the mountains of his boyhood, and the film reflects on the different paths that their lives have taken.

The title of the film derives from Indian mythology (which is also common to Nepal), in which at the centre of the disc-shaped world is Mount Meru (or Sumeru) surrounded by eight concentric mountain ranges (in the film these mountain ranges are transformed into eight mountains on the rim of the disc-world). Pietro asks which person has more knowledge: he who has traversed all eight mountain ranges, or he who has made his home on the tallest mountain in the centre, this being symbolic of the life-choices made by Pietro and Bruno respectively.

Source material
Based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Paolo Cognetti (English translation, right).

The trailer for the film can be viewed on Youtube here, and the UK trailer can be viewed here.

Production photos

Screenshots

Screenshots from Making-of Featurette from blu-ray

Below: Lupo Barbiero as Pietro with Filippo Timi as his on-screen father Giovanni Guasti

Below: Cristiano Sassella as young Bruno (right) with Alessandro Borghi, who plays Bruno as an adult

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