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ARTS, MEDUSA FILMS AND SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT PRESENT THE 1st US SCREENING OF “BAARIA” BY GIUSEPPE TORNATORE. OCTOBER 30 USC NORRIS CINEMA THEATER LOS ANGELES, OCT 23, 2009 - On 10/30/09 the special event at the Frank SInatra Hall.The movie produced by Medusa Films was the opening event of 2009 Venice Film Festival. BAARÌA in an amusing and wistful story of great passions and passionate utopian dreams. A legend thronged with heroes...A Sicilian family depicted across three generations: from Cicco to his son Peppino to his grandson Pietro... Touching lightly upon the private lives of these characters and their families, the film evokes the loves, dreams and disappointments of an entire community in the Palermo province from the 1930s up to the 1980s: during the Fascist period, Cicco is a humble shepherd who, however, finds time to pursue his passion: books, epic poems, the great popular romance novels. In the days when people went hungry and during World War II, his son Peppino witnesses injustice and discovers a passion for politics. After the war, his fateful encounter with the woman of his life. A relationship opposed by one and all because Peppino has become a Communist. But the two young lovers will succeed in fulfilling their dream.35mm print provided courtesy of Summit Entertainment.In Italian with English Subtitles. Not Rated. Running Time: 2 hrs, 41 mins.ABOUT GIUSEPPE TORNATORE (Director and Screenwriter)Born in Bagheria (Palermo). After many years dedicated to the theatre, to photography and to the making of a number of documentary films, he made his debut at twenty-nine as a film director with The Professor, for which he also co-wrote the screenplay with Massimo De Rita. But it was in 1989 that he achieved international renown with Cinema Paradiso, for which he wrote the story and the screenplay and which won him an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then, Tornatore's films have been regularly distributed worldwide winning him awards and success, including Malèna, The Unknown Woman, A Pure Formality and The Star Maker. He has worked with many great actors including: Ben Gazzarra, Jacques Perrin, Marcello Mastroianni, Michèle Morgan, Sergio Castellitto, Laura Del Sol, Philippe Noiret, Tim Roth, Gerard Depardieau, Roman Polanski, Monica Bellucci, and Michele Placido. DIRECTOR'S STATEMENTOne of the countless possible etymologies has it that Bagheria might also derive from Bab el gherid, which in Arabic apparently means The Gateway of the Wind. But, from time immemorial, we've always called it Baarìa. Baarìa, in the province of Palermo, is the town where I was born and raised up to the age of twenty-eight. Too old according to Don Fabrizio Salina, the Prince in Lampedusa's The Leopard, who claimed that young men should leave Sicily before they turned seventeen to avoid absorbing into their character the typical Sicilian flaws. So I had time to absorb them all. First of all, definitely, the idea that wherever you were born is the centre of the world, indeed, is the world itself. And lastly, but no less serious, the ephemeral escape into the limbo of your memories as soon as you realise that the world has actually always been elsewhere and has kept on turning without you. Well, it is perhaps to recapture the innocence I lost the day I disembarked from my ship from Sicily or, even worse, to be consistent with the flaws I have by being a baariòto that, for over twenty years (some traces had already surfaced in my works set against a Sicilian background), I have been thinking about making a film about the unique and timeless season in my life when the Universe started in Via Gioacchino Guttuso 114, unfolded from Piazza Madrice along the alley of Corso Umberto I°, and ended at the Roundabout di Palagonia. It's only, all in all, a few hundred metres. But if you walk them up and down for years, you could learn what the whole world will never be able to teach you. -- Giuseppe Tornatore info@losangelesitalia.com or http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=32928964754