Film screening on June 25: Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy

On Tuesday, June 25, from 6:00 to 7:30 pm, the Menlo Park Library’s 7th Annual Summer Puppetry Festival continues with a special documentary, Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy. Actor John Turturro takes us along on a trip to his grandmother’s homeland of Sicily, where before cinema, puppetry beat out sports as the main form of entertainment.

While exploring the island’s vanishing traditions, Turturro 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.