THE TAORMINA FILM FEST BRINGS LUCK TO ITS FILMS: 5 OUT OF 20 NEW FILMS PRESENTED AT THE LAST FESTIVAL,  HAVE BEEN SELECTED AS NATIONAL ENTRIES FOR THE BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM OSCAR ® 

The staff of the Taormina Film Fest, headed by film critic Deborah Young, wishes to share its satisfaction in the exceptionally high percentage of films presented at the last festival that have been chosen by their respective countries as national candidates for an Academy Award ® as Best Foreign Language Film. Five out of the twenty new titles screened at Taormina this year – chosen by the festival’s artistic director Deborah Young together with programmers Maria Rosaria Cerino and Lorenza Micarelli – will represent Italy, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Argentina and Bulgaria in the Foreign Language Film pre-selection. 

Last June, the 53rd Taormina Film Fest presented a compact, highly selected program of 20 new films, of which eight were international or world premiers. 
“The surprising result of finding some 25% of our films selected by the countries that produced them as their Academy Award entries,” said Young, who became festival director this year, “is a strong confirmation we’re on the right track in re-designing Taormina as a boutique festival able to offer international distributors a finely sieved selection of  art house films they can count on commercially as well as critically.”  

Winner of the festival’s Audience Award, WARDEN OF THE DEAD (Bulgaria) directed by Ilian Simeonov is a surreal story about a teenage boy who guards a cemetery. In the Irish film KINGS, director Tom Collins uses caustic black humor to depict the harsh lives of men forced to immigrate to England. Lucia Puenzo’s extraordinary film debut XXY recounts a drama involving hermaphroditism.

The Puerto Rican MALDEAMORES, which was screened in Taormina’s ancient Greek Theater to public acclaim, is a comic-romantic weaving together of the lives and loves of its characters, directed by the young couple Carlos Ruiz Ruiz and Mariem Pereira and produced by Benicio del Toro.  

Finally, Italy’s Oscar ® candidate LA SCONOSCIUTA / THE UNKNOWN WOMAN directed by Giuseppe Tornatore crowned a complete retrospective of the great Sicilian director’s work. 

Distributors may be interested to know that territorial rights to many of these titles are still free. For more information, please contact the staff of the Taormina Film Fest.

TAORMINA FILM FEST IN SICILIA    JUNE 15 – 21, 2008

Via degli Zingari, 1100184 Rome, ITALY festival@taorminafilmfest.it 

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