Mountain Day, the 5 most beautiful films set in the mountains

December 11th is the International Mountain Daya special commemoration established in 2003 by the United Nations General Assembly following the success of the International Year of Mountains in 2002, which contributed to increasing global awareness of the crucial role of the various peaks on the planet and at the same time stimulated the creation of national committees in numerous countries, thus sharpening attention towards extraordinary and delicate ecosystems, custodians of biodiversity, millenary cultures and resources vital to human life. An anniversary which, once again, invites us to focus on what the mountains represent and how their protection is essential in the face of contemporary environmental (and not only) challenges.

Even cinema, with its intrinsic ability to capture and amplify the great themes of the world, has repeatedly celebrated the mountain by electing it as undisputed protagonist oa essential scenario of the story; transforming it now into a space of wonder, freedom and adventure, now into a place of harsh trials and conflicts, where nature, in revealing its own intransigent beauty, simultaneously shows its own hostility, reminding us with restless and painful, but also lucid and cruel portraits, that altitude does not allow superficiality nor, much less, any kind of presumption.

Vermilion (2024)

Vermiliona masterpiece delicate in form and brutal in signed content Maura Delperooffers a poetically rigorous look at life in a Trentino community during the final acts of the Second World War. At the center of the narrative is the simple life of a peasant family, but above all the tormented growth of three sisters, suspended between the desire for self-determination and the imposition of traditional roles that the family and society continue to exercise like a destiny already written.

The harshness of the Alpine landscape, still and uncontaminated, intertwines with the austerity of daily life, in a tangle that itself becomes the living material of the staging. The sharp peaks that overlook the town are no longer just a backdrop, but an incisive metaphor of the rigidity that imprisons and at the same time a place in which the director roots personal memories, as well as the only possible starting point towards reconciliation, intimate and finally liberating.

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I segreti di Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Yes I segreti on Brokeback Mountain the mountains become walls, a nest and at the same time a protected space of an impossible love story between two cowboys, where it is the profound American stigmatization of the Sixties that imposes the unachievability of a shared destiny, condemning desire to clandestinity and regret.

The masterful direction of gives shape to the inevitable fate of the protagonists The Leewhile delicate and timely photography transforms the immensity of the Wyoming mountains – although reconstructed among the Canadian peaks – into a lacerating allegory of what could be and will never be. They complete the superlative interpretations of Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledgerwhich thus make up a universal film on the difficulty of loving in an adverse context, where hostility is not given by the angular peaks, which indeed become refuge, but by the rurality of a violent and conservative social context.

127 ore (2010)

Speaking of mountains that do not grant discounts or allow the slightest underestimation, 127 ore Of Danny Boyle brings to the screen the true and dramatic story of hiker Aron Ralston, played by James Francowho was trapped in a Utah canyon with his arm crushed by a boulder and forced, after 127 hours of loneliness and pain, to make an extreme gesture to survive.

The canyon, sought as an escape from reality and a symbol of absolute freedom, progressively transforms into not only a physical but also a mental prison, revealing the thin line that separates the exhilaration of freedom from the precipice of tragedy. Boyle, with a visual style intensely adherent to the protagonist’s experience, returns the ambivalence inscribed in the heights where only nature can impose the only possible, inevitable and indifferent rhythm.

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Seven Years in Tibet (1997)

Also Seven years in Tibet brings to the screen the true story of a mountaineer on the run, even if here the protagonist is not a solitary American, but the Austrian Heinrich Harrer, played by Brad Pittwho at the height of the Second World War escapes from a British prison camp in India and reaches the forbidden Tibet, where the coincidence of exile becomes the unexpected occasion of an encounter destined to change his identity.

The deep friendship he forms with the young Dalai Lama – of whom he becomes tutor and confidant until the Chinese invasion – cracks his selfish vision of the world and opens a path towards a new meaning of life. Here the Himalayan mountains, an extreme challenge for the mountaineer in the form of personal ambition and desire for glory, they transform into a place of spirituality and peaceas well as the context of an inner growth that is never announced as such, but is sedimented in the concrete experience of limits and belonging.

A Hidden Life (2019)

A hidden life Of Terrence Malick gives substance to the real insubordination of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), Catholic farmer and Austrian conscientious objector, who in 1938 refused to fight for the Third Reich after the arrival of Hitler’s troops in Austria, knowing that this choice would lead to the death sentence for treason. Arrested, he was martyred by the Nazis in 1943 and, in 2007, beatified by the Catholic Church.

The film, initially titled Shave and presented at the 2019 Cannes Film Festivalwas filmed in the summer of 2016 between Bressanone, Brunico and, in particular, the village of Cima Sappada. Through the director’s typical ascetic and contemplative rhythm, A hidden life weaves the great story with the intimacy of a moral choiceleaving the mountains themselves to guard the unshakable silence of a man who does not betray what he believes in.

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Passionate about new and old media and an evolving scholar of over-the-top multimedia services, I write primarily about the big and small screen and environmental sustainability.

After taking my first steps as a PR Consultant for Prime Video, I moved to the other side of the “stage”, embracing the world of journalism. I have written, among other things, about cinema for Sky TG24, of innovation for Innovando News and current affairs for the Corriere del Trentino, and then landed in the world of Hearst.

In my ideal life The Office is on loop, I am surrounded by animals and the Dolomites are the backdrop. Gen Z, I am a Millennial in everyday life: eternally nostalgic, I pretend to know how to use TikTok, but I have never abandoned paper diaries.