Taormina Film Festival – Sicily
The 56th edition of the Taormina Film Festival started on Saturday in three dimensions, with Disney/Pixar’s “Toy Story 3″ becoming the first major 3D film to premiere in an outdoor venue, the festival’s famous greek Teatro Antico, and the film was well received by the enthusiastic sellout crowd.
The Taormina Film Festival Master Class hosted by actor Robert De Niro Sunday turned into an impromptu film pitching session. An insistent member of the audience interrupted a question-and-answer event with journalists to ask the two-time Oscar-winning actor if he would consider making a film about two family members murdered by the Sicilian Mafia.
The emotion-laden question came just as organizers were wrapping up the hour-long event. The questioner thrust a photo — ostensibly of his murdered cousins — into the startled De Niro’s hands. The actor did not reply and he left with the photo, while the questioner was escorted away by security.
While the questioner cast some unexpected light on the Sicilian region’s ongoing struggles against organized crime, it was also a scene-stealing conclusion to what had been an unusually informative session, following the screening of De Niro’s 2006 directorial effort “The Good Shepherd.”
Asked about his taste for directing more films in the future, the 66-year-old De Niro said he’d likely only direct “two or three” more films in his lifetime, including one or two sequels to “The Good Shepherd,” an intellectual spy thriller set during the early years of the Cold War. De Niro said he envisioned a second film starting in 1961, when “The Good Shepherd” ends and spanning until the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. A third installment, he said, would start after the fall of the Berlin Wall and go forward to the present time.
To read more, check the complete article at hollywoodreporter.com
Tags: cinema, film festival taormina, sicily, taormina
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