ABOUT BAARÌA

Baarìa is Giuseppe Tornatore's lush and romantic reimagining of the path of one Sicilian man who grows up, marries, has children, matures and ages, compiling a rich breadth of experiences along the way. It is also the tale of a typical village and the entertaining dynamics of small-town life where everyone knows everyone's business.

Peppino, the nickname of the boy at the story's heart, is a tough little kid in the 1930s, used to the rough-and-tumble world of Baarìa (local slang for Tornatore's native Bagheria), a hot and dusty Sicilian village with one main street. His adventures are many and his memories singular: men gambling in the local square, goats eating his schoolbooks and the enchantment of silent film screenings. All of this plays out against the darker canvas of black-shirted fascists strutting in the streets, the declaration of WW II and the ecstatic moment of liberation when the Allies land on the island.

Slowly, a man and an individual is formed. In the chaotic tumult of post-war Baarìa, an older Peppino (Francesco Scianna) joins the Communist Party. Coming from a poor family and witnessing the humiliations meted out by local landowners, he feels socialism is the road to justice and a fairer world. When he falls head over heels for the raven-haired Mannina (Margareth Madè), however, her parents hold his party membership against him. As Peppino ages, success rubs up against failure, and pain mingles with happiness. In Baarìa, life can be simple or complicated, full of humour and sadness, but it is never uninteresting; it simply flows. Tornatore is in love with his world, his characters and his landscape. Everything comes alive under his touch. He has an unerring ability to summon the dreams and aspirations of a young man fighting for his beliefs, while also reveling in the exuberance and comedy of existence. Baarìa captures the wonder of a lifetime of living.

35mm print provided courtesy of Summit Entertainment.


ABOUT GIUSEPPE TORNATORE (Director and Screenwriter)

Born in Bagheria (Palermo). After many years dedicated to the theatre, to photography and to the making of a number of documentary films, he made his debut at twenty-nine as a film director with The Professor, for which he also co-wrote the screenplay with Massimo De Rita. But it was in 1989 that he achieved international renown with Cinema Paradiso, for which he wrote the story and the screenplay and which won him an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then, Tornatore's films have been regularly distributed worldwide winning him awards and success, including Malèna, The Unknown Woman, A Pure Formality and The Star Maker. He has worked with many great actors including: Ben Gazzarra, Jacques Perrin, Marcello Mastroianni, Michèle Morgan, Sergio Castellitto, Laura Del Sol, Philippe Noiret, Tim Roth, Gerard Depardieau, Roman Polanski, Monica Bellucci, and Michele Placido. 

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
 
One of the countless possible etymologies has it that Bagheria might also derive from Bab el gherid, which in Arabic apparently means The Gateway of the Wind but, from time immemorial, we’ve always called it Baarìa.


Baarìa, in the province of Palermo, is the town where I was born and raised and stayed until I was 28 years old. Too old, according to Don Fabrizio Salina, the Prince in Lampedusa’s The Leopard, who claimed that young men should leave Sicily before they turned 17 to avoid absorbing into their character the typical Sicilian flaws.

So I had time to absorb them all. First of all, definitely, the idea that wherever you were born is the centre of the world; indeed, is the world itself. And lastly, but of no less importance, the ephemeral escape into the limbo of your memories as soon as you realize the world has actually always been elsewhere and has kept on turning without you.


Well, it is perhaps to recapture the innocence I lost the day I disembarked from my ship from Sicily or, even worse, to be consistent with the flaws I have by being a baariòto that, for more than 20 years I have been thinking about making a film about the unique and timeless season in my life when the universe started in Via Gioacchino Guttuso 114, unfolded from Piazza Madrice along the alley of Corso Umberto I° and ended at the Roundabout di Palagonia. It’s only, all in all, a few hundred meters, but if you walk them up and down for years, you could learn what the whole world will never be able to teach you. 

-- Giuseppe Tornatore