Sicilian Ghost Story at Critics Week in Beirut

Beirut - The Italian Cultural Institute opens the "rerun" of Critics Week in the Lebanese capital with the film "Sicilian Ghost Story", also screened at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival. The initiative, held in collaboration with the Metropolis Cinema Association and the French Institute of Beirut, will be featuring the film directed by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, who have been invited to attend the opening on July 4.

After the screening, the two directors will lead a public discussion at the Sofil Center, in Achrafieh, one of Beirut's oldest neighborhoods. Based on a true story, the film tells the story of Luna, a Sicilian teenager with a passion for drawing, who develops a romantic attachment to a class mate, Giuseppe, against the wishes of her parents, particularly her stern Swiss mother, because his father is involved in organized crime. Giuseppe shares his first name with Giuseppe Di Matteo and like him he mysteriously disappears, at the end of an afternoon spent with Luna.

She refuses to accept his disappearance and comes into conflict with her family, her class mates and, in the film's dramatic crescendo, also with her best friend. Her certainty that Giuseppe can be saved comes to her from her odd dreams and from a terrible event in which she almost drowns in a lake and seems to find the boy in a kind of underwater cave. The truth, however, is far less magical and much more terrible.