Something to watch tonight: Friday 11 April

The Eight Mountains/Le otto montagne (van Groeningen/Vandermeersch)

The programme for the 2025 Italian Film Festival in New Zealand has been announced and I’ll be previewing some of the titles contained in it before the first screenings in Auckland on 29 April.

Today, though, I thought I would look back at my preview article for last year’s festival (published at RNZ) and see if any of the three were available online yet and – pleasingly – they are.

There’s Still Tomorrow has only just completed a successful theatrical return season and is now available as a digital rental via the usual outlets.

Corrupt cop thriller Last Night of Amore (L’ultima notte di Amore) is available as a digital rental but from Amazon’s Prime Video only.

The one I want to recommend today is an AroVision exclusive rental: The Eight Mountains.

Having only done the tiniest bit of homework before this film began, I had thought that this was the story of two mountaineers who climb eight mountains together over a lifetime of friendship.

I got the friendship bit right, but in fact the film is more of a spiritual and emotional journey than a physical one. There are mountains – the friends meet as children in the Italian Alps and the mountains, they are beautiful – but the title refers to the Buddhist concept and that the eight mountains are within us to be overcome.

In 1984, middle-class Pietro spends a summer in Grana where he befriends Bruno, the only child left in the village as economic change has forced the population to move away for work. Despite becoming great friends, they are estranged during adolescence and the adult Pietro (Luca Marinelli) is surprised to discover that his parents had kept in touch with Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), and even bought an old hut for him to restore.

Refer a friend

Friends again, Pietro and Bruno embark on the rebuild together and they both seem to have found a sense of purpose that had previously eluded them.

As adulthood goes on, though, life challenges the two men differently and we see how easy it is for male friendships to drift apart. Because of the assumptions we make, we often think that we don’t need to ask questions, or check in on our friends, because when we are together it seems so easy. Until all of a sudden, it isn’t.

The grand alpine (and Himalayan) backdrops provide a sense of the scale of human existence, but they don’t diminish the scale of the emotion or feeling of being human. Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s film reminds us of that.