Movie Review: ‘Vermiglio'

Showing At Buffalo's North Park Theater Through March 6

Operational Zone Of The Alpine Foothills

Vermiglio is an alpine town in Northeast Italy, in a region known as Trentino-Alto. Nominally Italian, it is an autonomous region that has historically included 30% German speakers. It lies 75 miles from Innsbruck, Austria, about as far as Buffalo from Rochester.

Following the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria, many of its German speaking people were transported east as part of Hitler’s policy of “Germanization,” or the incorporation of German speaking peoples who were not German citizens (Volksdeutsche), into newly conquered lands (Lebensraum).

Although this population transfer was attenuated by the outbreak of war in 1939, thousands of people from Trentino-Alto were relocated to greater Nazi Germany. In 1943, when the Italian government signed an armistice with the Allies, the region was annexed into The Third Reich. Italian rule was restored in 1945.

The trauma of war is a powerful presence in the story, as families struggle with lost fathers …