Yahoo News Marco Mueller Takes Taormina Film Festival Back to Formula Used in Golden Age (EXCLUSIVE)
Veteran festival director Marco Mueller was only hired to take over as the artistic director of the Taormina Film Festival in April this year. “I’m stressed out,” he told Variety, two weeks ahead of the festival opening, but he is philosophical. “The history of this island is one of people trying to conquer Sicily, but Sicily has always ended up conquering the conquerors. We are conquered not only by the beauty of the place, but also the local customs, not to mention the food and wine, of course.”
Mueller, who has previously headed the Locarno and the Venice film festivals as well as the Pingyao Film Festival more recently, has a clear vision for the direction he wishes to pursue. “From the moment I signed my contract, I knew I really wanted to go back to the formula that was used in the golden years of the festival, which for me, is the festival of the 1980s.”
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The beginning of this golden period can be traced back to one event: “In 1976, Peter Weir won the Golden Charybdis for ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock,’ and it established the importance of the film. From that moment onwards all the producers in the English language territories started thinking that Taormina was a great launching pad for their films. So, that made it possible for the artistic director Guglielmo Biraghi in the 80s to create a festival which really became a meeting place for everybody.”
Mueller is intent on repeating that by discovering and promoting young talent and attracting a new and younger public to the festival. “I never believed that the audience, as a general entity, really exists. I always thought you have to reason in terms of different groups of viewers. So, my idea was to try to get back the younger viewers, instead of just the affluent middle-class person who can afford to drive a car to Taormina and pay the expensive parking and dine in a Michelin-starred restaurant. So that is why, even in the Teatro Antico, we have some very young directors. Our opening film is the horror film “Saint Clare” and it is only Mitzi Peirone’s second film and our closing film is also a second film. Or a filmmaker like Lee Isaac Chung who can go from a film like ‘Minari’ to ‘Twisters,’ which will open in the U.S. a few days after it shows in Taormina.”
The mixture of popular Hollywood filmmaking will be balanced with films from closer to home, with a section focused on the Mediterranean and another devoted to Sicilian filmmakers. “Hopefully, young people will discover the Sicilian workshop titles. They are mostly first and second films and world premieres by young Sicilian filmmakers who are exploring very different directions. They range from anthropological narratives to fantasy to visual poems. We must prove that Sicily is still a laboratory for a lot of varied experiences.”
The Mediterranean Focus section has taken on global significance with the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and Mueller has not shied from addressing it. “We are not hiding from the current contradictions happening in the world,” Mueller says. “We are happy that Rashid Masharawi, the Palestinian filmmaker, will be presenting the world premiere of a collective work ‘From Ground Zero,’ created by 22 young Palestinian filmmakers, who are still living in Gaza, who shot the untold tales of what life is like under the bombs.” Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai’s Berlinale title “Shikun,” a loose adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros,” shares the same program along with Palestinian Mahdi Fleifel’s “To a Land Unknown,” which screened earlier this year in Cannes.
“Taormina was never international in the sense of a global festival. It always insisted on European, and sometimes also Mediterranean films. It would have been very easy for me to fill the program with Asian films. But I had to stay true to the festival’s tradition and the festival was always also a major platform for French filmmakers. So we are happy because we are showing the English language version of ‘Spectateurs,’ which is called ‘Filmlovers!’ The other major French film that we’re showing is the international premiere of a new version of Jacques Rivette’s ‘Va Savoir,’ which is the Director’s Cut that has never been seen outside of France. And it includes more than one hour of a piece by the Sicilian playwright Luigi Pirandello, so it’s a major thing for the Sicilian public to discover one of the fathers of the French New Wave tackling with comedy one of Pirandello’s most esoteric plays. The film will be introduced by Sergio Castellitto, who plays the lead in the film and has never seen this version.”
A big attraction for the Italian audience will be the lifetime achievement Silver Ribbons to be awarded to Italian actor and film director Christian De Sica and Italian writer-actor Carlo Verdone. “The Silver Ribbons are a major thing for us, because I’ve managed to convince the film journalists union to come back to Taormina. The festival always used to start with the Silver Ribbons because that made sure that press and media, and also the key Italian film personalities, filmmakers, actors, actresses would arrive for the opening and also stay on often for the entire duration of the festival. Christian De Sica’s father [neo-realist director, Vittorio De Sica] loved gambling and during the 50s and 60s there was a casino here, so Christian has memories of being here throughout his childhood.”
Looking to the future, Mueller sees the possibility of expansion. “I hope that if I continue with Taormina, we can play the Mediterranean card to the full. We would need to build two more theaters and we should start thinking in terms of an industry event.”
Sicily will conquer once more.
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