Krzysztof Zanussi receives Arte Award at Taormina

Krzysztof Zanussi receives Arte Award at the Taormina Film Festival On June 21, 2006 the Polish film director Krzysztof Zanussi received the prestigious "Harry Winston" Taormina Arte Award for Cinematic Excellence at
the Italian international film festival held in Taormina, Sicily.

Accepting the award, Zanussi stated that he had a special bond with Sicily.
About fifteen years ago he staged two works at the Teatro Massimo in
Palermo, and presently he is directing a film in Catania and Syracuse called
The Black Sun (Il Sole Nero / Czarne S³oñce) with the famous Italian stars
Valeria Golina and Enrico Lo Verso. The film is based on a true story of a
crime in Catania and focuses on the power of evil. Zanussi is the co-scriptwriter with Rocco Familiari, author of the play of the same name.
He belongs to one of the most awarded polish film directors ever.

Born in 1939 in Poland, and descended from an aristocratic family of Italian
origins, Zanussi studied physics at the University of Warsaw and philosophy
in Krakow. These studies and his Catholicism were, and are still, a source
of his cinematographic creativity, as he has said. When did he discover
cinema? According to film journalist Marek Perleman this happened in 1956
when a new film club in Warsaw opened with Charlie Chaplin's The Great
Dictator. Among the audience who discussed the film until four in the
morning was not only the now famous and controversial Jerzy Urban but also
the seventeen-year-old Zanussi.

Guido Convents