The festival will celebrate its 70th Anniversary this year.

Running from July 12th to the 19th, this year’s Taormina Film Festival on the gorgeous Italian island of Sicily has a couple of reasons to celebrate. The first is this will be the boutique film festival’s 70th anniversary edition and former Venice, Rome and also Pingyao and Macao festivals director Marco Müller has been appointed Artistic Director. A double whammy of coolness.

The announcement of Müller’s appointment was made by the special commissioner of the Taormina Arte Sicilia Foundation/ Fondazione Taormina Arte Sicilia, Sergio Bonomo, who enthusiastically declared: "Maestro Müller's professional contribution will be a driving force of success for the prestigious film event.”

The Festival stands among some of the most renowned and prestigious events in the world, and its story as well as history combines glamour, culture and great cinema. Over the years, the TFF has brought many Italian and international stars to the Teatro Antico, the Ancient Greek open-air theatre – helping to cement Taormina as an iconic destination.

A producer, scholar, film professor and festival “maker” for more than 40 years, Marco Müller has directed, among others, the Pesaro New Cinema Festival, the Locarno and Rotterdam film festivals, the Venice Film Festival, the Rome Film Festival. He is currently director of the Film Art Research Centre at the Shanghai University and Professor Emeritus at the Shanghai Film Academy; in China he created and directed both the Pingyao and Macao festivals. He has written and edited more than twenty monographic books on international cinema. And, if that weren’t enough, the movies he has produced have won awards at the Venice Film Festival, the Cannes, Berlin and Sundance Festivals.

In 2002 No Man’s Land, the debut of Bosnian writer and director Danis Tanović set in the midst of the Bosnian war won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Müller was one of the film’s co-producers.

In his commitment for the Taormina Film Fest, Müller is working with the contribution of a prestigious selection committee, consisting of Sandra Hebron, Enrico Magrelli, Carmelo Marabello, and Édouard Waintrop, who will be joined by Joumane Chahine as consultant for international relations.

"I am happy to work in Sicily to rediscover my roots - I was born and raised in Rome, but my only quarter of Italian blood is from Palermo," Müller said of the appointment. "I thank all the people, in the institutions and among friends of cinema, who have built for me this opportunity to experiment in Taormina the moving thought of how a useful popular festival can still be built. We will use the extraordinary Teatro Antico - which was always a source of jealousy for me when I was programming Locarno's Piazza Grande - and other cinemas in Taormina.”

The Taormina Film Festival is promoted and organized by the Fondazione Taormina Arte Sicilia with the support of the Regional Department for Tourism, Sports and Entertainment of the Sicilian Regional Authority and of the Sicilia Film Commission, of the Taormina Municipality and of the MiC, Ministero della Cultura – Direzione Generale cinema e audiovisivo.

For more info, check out their website.