Sicily on Page & Screen - Sicily - page 605

Other films set in Sicily include Wim Wender's Palermo Shooting (2008), lambasted by
most critics as pretentious and boring; and Sicilia! (1999), a film version of Elio Vit-
torini's acclaimed novel Conversazione in Sicilia , directed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-
Marie Straub.
Sicily itself has produced few directors of note, with the best-known exception being
Giuseppe Tornatore (born 1956). Tornatore followed up on the incredible success of his
semi-autobiographical film Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso; 1988) with films
including Malèna (2000), starring Monica Bellucci in a coming-of-age story set in Sicily
in the 1940s; L'Uomo delle Stele (The Star Maker; 1995), also set in rural Sicily in the
1940s; and Baarìa - La Porta del Vento (Baarìa - Door of the Wind; 2009), the story of
three generations of a local family between 1920 and 1980. Two versions of Baarìa were
made: the first in the local Sicilian dialect of Baariotu and the second dubbed in Italian.
Like Tornatore, Roman-born Emanuele Crialese has made Sicily his muse. Two of his
films, Respiro (2002) and Nuovomondo (The Golden Door; 2006), are set here. Respiro is
about a woman whose unorthodox behaviour challenges her family and islander neigh-
bours, while Nuovomondo is a dreamy record of a Sicilian family's emigration to New
York at the turn of the 20th century. Crialese's 2011 film Terraferma deals with the very
contemporary issue of illegal immigration on the island of Linosa through a story of a
fisherman's family.
See a careful study of 21st-century Sicily in Emanuele Crialese's film Terraferma , dealing with illegal im-
migration.