Italian director Maura Delpero's sequel to Maternal is an intimate epic of wondrous rigor and control, set in a remote World War II mountain village.

Head bowed, hands clasped, Italian director Maura Delpero’s quietly breathtaking “Vermiglio” unfolds from small, tangible details of furniture and fabrics and the hide of a dairy cow into a memorable vision of everyday rural life in the high Italian Alps. Far away, World War II has ended — an earth-shattering event felt here only in abstract ways, because there is real work of community and family to continue, not to mention the private work of finding your own path to walk beneath those towering peaks. For those who live on their slopes, the mountains must be the beginning and the end of everything, the amen to every prayer.

It is winter, and a sleeping household, two or three to a bed, slowly begins to stir. The eldest daughter Lucia (Martina Scrinzi) milks the cow, dreamily resting her face, which she has apparently stolen from a Vermeer painting, against the animal’s warm flank. Her mother Adele (Roberta Rovelli) warms the milk and distributes it among her seven children, along with chunks of bread to dip for breakfast. Automatically, the pushing children (mostly nonprofessionals who deliver effortless naturalism) arrange themselves in order of size at the sturdy table around which so much of this family’s life revolves. And at the head of it all sits Adele’s husband Caesar (Tommaso Ragno), a stern but not unloving patriarch with the sonorous voice of a man accustomed to being obeyed, who runs the local one-room school where all his children, except his youngest, sickly baby, receive the same lessons, regardless of age.

Over the changing seasons, the gaze of Mikhail Krichman’s beautifully spare, assured camera is divided among the many family members, capturing them all at work or at rest, the carbolically scrubbed harshness of their daily domestic routines offset by community gatherings and bursts of play, the moments when Caesar brings his beloved gramophone into the classroom and teaches his students to hear summer in Vivaldi’s music. But while other relationships are sketched in – eldest son Dino (Patrick Gardner) is surly and resentful of his father; flirtatious neighbor Virginia (Carlotta Gamba) causes a wave of sexual confusion – the focus is gradually drawn to Caesar’s daughters. There’s Flavia (Anna Thaler), the brainy one destined to win the only chance at a decent education the family can afford. There’s Ada (Rachele Potrich), the strange, dark one with her notebook full of self-invented penances for the sinful times she sneaks behind the wardrobe door to touch herself. And there’s the beautiful Lucia who falls for Pietro (Giuseppe De Domenico), a soulful soldier from Sicily who saved her uncle’s life and then deserted with him to hide in the village.