John Turturro and Roman Paska Appear at IFC Center's REHEARSAL FOR A SICILIAN TRAGEDY Screening Tonight

Rehearsal For A Sicilian Tragedy will screen in the Stranger Than Fiction Series at IFC Center tonight, January 8, 2013. John Turturro and director Roman Paska will be in attendance.

In Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy, actor John Turturro (O Brother Where Art Thou?, Barton Fink, Do the Right Thing) takes audiences on a haunting, intimate journey to his maternal homeland of Sicily. There, while exploring the island's vanishing traditions, he is taken under the wing of one of the puppet theater's few remaining practitioners, Mimmo Cuticchio, who instructs him in the distinctively Sicilian art of puppetry.

Filmed during preparations for the Sicilian Day of the Dead, this evocative, magical-realist documentary was directed by Turturro's longtime collaborator, Roman Paska, himself a world-renowned puppeteer. Both an homage to the art of storytelling and a portrait of a Sicily little known to the outside world, Paska's film brings viewers to an otherworldly place, lost in time.

REHEARSAL FOR A SICILIAN TRAGEDY is now available on DVD from First Run Features.

REHEARSAL FOR A SICILIAN TRAGEDY
A film by Roman Paska
76 minutes, documentary, color, 2009