As news about the 2023 Cannes lineup begins to trickle in, American audiences are finally getting a chance to catch up on some of the films that played at last year’s festival. Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s “The Eight Mountains” made waves when it competed for the Palme d’Or and won the Prix Jury prize in 2022, and now the film is just weeks away from premiering at arthouses in New York and Los Angeles.
The film tells the story of a close relationship between two young Italian boys who spent their childhoods together in a mountain village before going in different directions. 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.
“Here, you feel it all, because there is so much heartfelt detail,” Ella Kemp wrote in her IndieWire review of the film. “Not necessarily in tactile closeups on hands over skin or insects humming in the summer grass, but in the way the light hits the vast expanse of water just right, sparkling as you float, flowing so clear until you see yourself back and have no choice but to follow where it takes you. That same care extends to the people who go up there, too, with Pietro and Bruno’s childhood so wonderfully captured in its idyllic pockets of unequivocal joy. It’s what the boys of Pixar’s ‘Luca’ would have had in their gorgeous summer together, it’s the same childlike pleasure Elio and Oliver shared in ‘Call Me By Your Name’ as the film took them up the mountains for just a minute, bellowing one another’s names through the clouds, before, inevitably, having to walk back down and pretend they never felt it.”
“The Eight Mountains” is directed by Oscar-nominated Felix van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”) and Charlotte Vandermeesch. The two collaborators co-wrote the film with Paolo Cognetti. The cast includes Luca Marinelli, Alessandro Borghi, Lupo Barbiero, Cristiano Sassella, and Elisabetta Mazzullo.
Sideshow and Janus Films are set to release “The Eight Mountains” theatrically in New York on April 28 and in Los Angeles on May 5. Watch the trailer, an IndieWire exclusive, below.
