Taormina Film Festival 2024: Celebrating Sicily

The first thing you feel is the heat. Rising from the shoreline and into the city, drifting up the centuries-old seating in Taormina’s open-air Greek Theatre, with attendees using whatever they can find – often their entry tickets as makeshift fans – to stave off the warmth. With Mount Etna erupting several times during the festival week, it’s fittingly volcanic weather to match the programme for this year’s Taormina Film Festival, which includes a claustrophobic horror flick, several films about contemporary struggles in mainland Europe, and even a film about violent weather events. But in a city this beautiful, it’s hard to begrudge the mercury as it inches upwards of 34ºC – especially when an ice-cold granita is never too far away, often waiting on a ceramic table charmingly daubed with summer fruit.

Festival fever felt inescapable on the island during this year’s 70th anniversary edition, from the second you stepped out of the logo-branded Catania airport and made your way to Taormina’s most famous viewpoint, the Piazza IX Aprile. There, overlooking the Ionian Sea, a red carpet was laid out alongside photographs of famous past attendees. Down the historic Corso Umberto and turning right onto Via Teatro Greco (pausing along the way for a cannoli or two is highly encouraged), the Grand Hotel Timeo was ready to welcome the stars in its new Timeo Summer Lounge, which is connected directly to the Greek Theatre through a secret passageway. It’s here, on opening night, that the hotel hosted guests such as Pilar Fogliati, Giacomo Giorgio and Emanuela Fanelli (whose most recent film There’s Always Tomorrow was the highest-grossing film in Italy last year, beating out both Barbie and Oppenheimer). In talks emceed by Vanity Fair Italia’s Editor in Chief Simone Marchetti, the three discussed their recent projects, inspirations and connection to the festival.

The festival opened with its teeth bared thanks to Italian director Mitzi Peirone, whose thriller Saint Clare – written by American Psycho scribe Guinevere Turner – saw the Teatro Antico squirm with its murder-heavy plotting. Onstage before the screening, the crew thanked incumbent festival director Marco Müller for taking a chance on a young Italian female director to grace such a grand stage with “a picture that delves into spiritual beauty, female sainthood and fate… there is no better home in the world for it than Sicily.” The film stars Bella Thorne, Ryan Phillippe and Rebecca De Mornay, the latter having already proved her pedigree in 90’s potboiler thrillers from The Hand That Rocks the Cradle to Guilty as Sin. Here, she’s a grieving mother trying to keep her granddaughter out of trouble as several mysterious disappearances begin to plague the town they live in.

Another transatlantic screening came in the form of Twisters, a standalone sequel to the 1996 blockbuster Twister. Starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones, the film sees a former storm-chaser sucked back into the dangerous pastime. Though disaster movies of this kind haven’t been en vogue for a while, this was exactly the right kind of popcorn flick for summer – knowingly funny enough to elicit laughs and full of high-octane thrills and scriptwriting smarts. Bringing yet more Hollywood sparkle to proceedings across the week, Nicolas Cage starred in the Australia-set thriller The Surfer, while Sharon Stone was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award on the festival’s closing night.

Outside of the glitzy premieres in the Greek Theatre, Taormina’s Palazzo dei Congressi brought several intriguing projects together, such as Israeli director Amos Gitai’s experimental film Shikun, French director Thierry de Peretti’s À son image which tackles the thorny topic of Corsican nationalism and Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi’s collection of shorts from filmmakers in Gaza, From Ground Zero. But above all – and fittingly – Müller’s first edition of the festival was an obvious, loving ode to the richesse of Sicily’s cinematic history. There were retrospective screenings such as Jean Epstein’s 1923 silent film La Montagne infidèle, which captures the smoking aftermath of an eruption of Mount Etna, as well as Nicola Belucci’s new film Quir, a documentary exploring various figures in Palermo’s LGBTQ+ scene.

Between dips in the sea at Lido Villeggiatura and aperitivo hour at Bar Timeo, the Taormina Film Festival is ideally positioned to offer up a cultural bounty for sun-seekers and film-lovers alike. And with its eye both on the storied past and the exciting future, it’s the perfect event to celebrate the beauty of Taormina herself.

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