The 56th Taormina Film Festival

June 12, 2010 9:00 am

to

June 18, 2010 6:00 pm

The Taormina Film Fest, celebrates its 56th year from June 12 to 18, 2010, against the stunning backdrop of the Teatro Antico of Taormina, one of Sicily’s most important and well-preserved monuments.

The festival is a major showcase for film premières from Hollywood and around the world. Each year the festival presents a careful selection of just 21 new features, chosen from the most significant recent production. A number of the films first screened in Taormina have been subsequently chosen to represent their countries as Oscar © candidates; others have gone on to win Emmys, Golden Globes and other major awards for their directors, producers, actors and actresses.

Prizes include the Golden Tauro for best film and the renowned Taormina Arte Awards given to outstanding members of the film community.

The Taormina Film Festival is directed by Deborah Young, the Hollywood Reporter’s chief international film critic. The festival, made famous by world-renowned guests from Elizabeth Taylor to Tom Cruise, Lana Turner to Quentin Tarantino to name a few, represents a special meeting point for the cinema, filmmakers and producers of the Mediterranean.

Each year it turns the spotlight on a different Mediterranean country whose current production is of particular interest.

A Sicilian director to watch: Luca Guadagnino

[...] Born in Palermo, Sicily, to an Algerian mother and a Sicilian father, Guadagnino grew up in Ethiopia and in the Sicilian capital before moving to Rome where his self-taught filmmaking training consisted of what he calls the Rainer Fassbinder film school: watching three movies a day and devouring books about film.

Meanwhile, after becoming “obsessed” with Swinton, first seen in Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio” (1986), he approached the actress about shooting a short. It never got made, but they struck up a friendship that blossomed into a creative partnership.

More at Variety.com

Sicilian cinema lands in Brazil

Sicilian cinema lands in Brazil thanks to collaboration set up in June 2009 between the Taormina Film Fest in Sicily and the Italian-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce. This will give way to a project full of cultural events which will have great media coverage for a month in the three most suggestive Brazilian cities: Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and Ribeirao Preto. “The Taormina Film Fest in Sicily wants to greatly support the Sicilian cinema, which is going through a happy and important period for its future”, said artistic director, Deborah Young. “The Festival, together with the Sicily Region and the Province of Messina, strongly supports the nomination of Ba’aria for the Oscar and offers all of its support to producers in Sicily who want to make new films that can be exported abroad”. Thanks to the work of the Artistic Direction of the Taormina Film Fest in Sicily, Sicily will be the special guest in Brazil of the fifth Italian Cinema Pirelli Week from November 25th to December 23rd.

Source Adnkronos.com

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