Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1011650
4 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 5 AUGUST 2018 THIS WEEK THEATRE THIS won't be the first time that Maltese audiences will be able to get a look into Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza's engrossing and courageous second fea- ture film, Sicilian Ghost Story – which in last January won the David di Donatello award for Best Adapted Script. Having premiered at last year's edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the filmmaking duo's re-imagining of a harrowing true crime episode that shook Italian society made its way to our shores later on that year, as it was screened at the 2017 edi- tion of the Valletta Film Festival. The filmmakers, whose connection with the island also extends to their par- ticipation as tutors within the MA in Film Studies at the University of Malta, were also in attendance at the film's Maltese premiere at the Festival, where The true-story kidnapping and murder of a pre-teen boy by the mafia makes for the most chilling of 'true crime' stories. But with the award-winning Sicilian Ghost Story, filmmakers Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia choose the fairy tale idiom to offer a radical response to gritty mafia narratives that is informed by love, not nihilism. TEODOR RELJIC speaks to Piazza as the acclaimed film makes its way to local cinemas this week The politics of fantasy and the radical power of love Star-crossed, never lost: Julia Jedlikowska and Gaetano Fernandez in Sicilian Ghost Story