The Eight Mountains

Adapting Paolo Cognetti’s prize-winning 2016 novel, directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch craft an exquisite, rapturous epic of camaraderie, despair, and loneliness, and the physical spaces that define a relationship. The Eight Mountains patiently chronicles a decades-long, life-changing friendship between two men of vastly different families and classes. Pietro, a Turin native, and Bruno, raised in the Alps, meet as 11-year-olds one summer in Grana—a small mountain village in northwestern Italy. This unique place, and the differences between the two, define the bond and the deviations that surface in adulthood as Pietro (Luca Marinelli, Martin Eden) is consumed by wanderlust that gradually separates him from Bruno (Alessandro Borghi). Van Groeningen’s longtime cinematographer, Ruben Impens (Titane, The Broken Circle Breakdown), imparts breathtaking, meticulously composed visuals to this deeply affecting epic of harmony and friction with the natural world. Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. A Sideshow and Janus Films release.