Veteran movie competition director Marco Müller has been named the brand new inventive director of Italy’s Taormina Movie Fest and can take over for Taormina’s seventieth version this 12 months.
Müller is without doubt one of the nice journeymen of the competition circuit, having run A-list occasions in Venice, Rotterdam, Locarno and, most just lately, the Pingyao competition in Macao.
Sergio Bonomo, particular commissioner of the Taormina Arte Sicilia Basis, which runs the competition, stated “Maestro” Müller might be “a driving power of success for the distinguished movie occasion.”
Taormina is without doubt one of the world’s oldest movie festivals, and one blessed with one of many world’s most stunning areas within the sun-kissed area of Sicily overlooking Mount Etna that The White Lotus picked because the backdrop for its season 2. The competition centerpiece is the Teatro Antico amphitheater, an historic Greek theater used for Taormina’s premieres.
However the competition’s historical past has been a stormy one, with 13 administrators in 16 years and fixed budgetary and funding troubles.
Below Müller’s tutelage, Taormina is hoping its Platinum version, which runs July 12 – 19, 2024, will run easily. Müller is finest recognized for his helming of the Venice Movie Competition from 2004 to 2011 and is credited with serving to revive the Italian occasion partly by attracting Hollywood studios to return to the Lido.
“I’m pleased to work in Sicily to rediscover my roots – I used to be born and raised in Rome, however my solely quarter of Italian blood is from Palermo,” stated Müller. “I thank all of the folks, within the establishments and amongst mates of cinema, who’ve constructed for me this chance to experiment in Taormina the shifting considered how a helpful standard competition can nonetheless be constructed. We are going to use the extraordinary Teatro Antico – which was at all times a supply of jealousy for me after I was programming Locarno’s Piazza Grande – and different cinemas in Taormina.”
Along with his competition work, Müller can also be an acclaimed movie professor and scholar and a producer of such movies as Danis Tanovic’s 2001 Oscar-winning No Man’s Land and Aleksandr Sokurov’s 2005 characteristic The Solar.