In Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy, actor John Turturro takes audiences on a haunting, intimate journey to his maternal homeland of Sicily. There, while exploring the island's vanishing traditions, he 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.