Brunello: The Gracious Visionary is a rather hagiographic film title for one’s life and work. Though it carries the sweep of an Italian epic, the two-hour experience manages not to mythologize its subject, the Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli. Directed by Oscar-winner Giuseppe Tornatore, best known for 1988’s Cinema Paradiso, it traces Cucinelli’s life from his upbringing in the Umbrian countryside to his ascent to the top of luxury fashion.

Rather than linger on his milestones as a clothier, Tornatore focuses on the belief system behind the brand, framing his subject as a persuasive advocate for humanistic capitalism. Cucinelli, now 72, speaking through a translator, tells Robb Report he wanted the project completed during his lifetime, noting that films produced after a person’s death rarely capture “the kind of character that they really were in life.”

Though it has been called a documentary, the film frequently slips into scenes using actors to portray key moments in Cucinelli’s life. Tornatore follows the designer’s rise from a home without electricity in rural Castel Rigone to the launch of his boldly colored cashmere line in the late 1970s. (Today his namesake company is known predominately for a softer, more neutral palette.) Though Cucinelli was studying to be an engineer, he dropped out of university to pursue his dream of making beautiful clothing in a dignified way.

That ethos is most visible in Solomeo, the medieval village that serves as both company headquarters and ideological core. Production spaces sit beside theaters, gardens, and civic areas; wages are notably high, and the workday has firm boundaries. Tornatore describes it less as a corporate campus and more as a carefully engineered ideal, where teams of talented people craft clothes for the great and the good. 

You may already recognize some of the faces populating his world. Cameos from Oprah Winfrey and Patrick Dempsey appear alongside interviews with Cucinelli’s wife and daughters, while the designer himself casually quotes Socrates—a recurring reminder of his philosophical approach to the brand, which he clearly sees more as a way of life than as a business.

The film returns often to the designer’s beliefs, that we are not owners of what we create, but merely stewards. “Marcus Aurelius, the emperor, said to himself, ‘You should live as if it was the last day of your life but plan as if you were to be here forever,’ ” Cucinelli recalls. “It depends on whether you feel like a temporary guardian of things or an owner of things. I think that I’m just someone passing by. A temporary guardian in the timeline. This idea of living as a temporary guardian is something I’ve always followed.” Released in Italy in December and arriving in select North American theaters in May, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary is ultimately a meditation on longevity—of a company, certainly, but also of a worldview rooted in restraint.