Two boys meet under a mountain in northern Italy, lose track of each other for years at a time, and keep finding their way back — that pull between distance and return is the whole engine of The Eight Mountains.
What is The Eight Mountains about?
Pietro, a city kid sent to the countryside for the summer, and Bruno, the last young resident of a near-empty alpine village, become friends as children and stay tied to each other into adulthood even as their lives pull in opposite directions. One drifts toward the wider world and its restlessness; the other stays close to the peaks and the herding life his father and grandfather knew. The film follows them across decades, using the mountain itself, and the idea that a person can spend a lifetime circling it without ever finishing the climb, as a way of asking what it means to inherit a place, a father's habits, or a friendship neither man ever fully chooses to let go of. Long stretches of near-silence in the landscape do as much narrative work as the dialogue.
About the cast
Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi play the adult leads, with Lupo Barbiero, Cristiano Sassella, Elisabetta Mazzullo, Andrea Palma, Surakshya Panta and Elena Lietti filling out the surrounding cast across the story's different time periods. Exactly which actor appears in which stretch of the timeline is not detailed in our records, so that detail is left open here.
Context & significance
Adapted from Paolo Cognetti's novel, The Eight Mountains is a 2022 drama co-directed by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, and produced across Belgium, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. At 147 minutes it takes its time, matching a story that is measured in decades rather than scenes, and it was widely and warmly received on the festival circuit.
Watching The Eight Mountains on Ktime
The Eight Mountains streams on K-Time after a simple, free account login, with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles available, so it can be watched in whichever form suits the viewer. The platform's Farsi navigation makes titles like this, drawn from European arthouse cinema, easy to find for Persian-speaking audiences abroad.