The last Greek-theatre screening of the Festival is a French movie called Sur le Bout des Doigt directed by Yves Angelo. The Festival's audience jury awarded it with the "best movie" prize. The film is about a mother-daughter relation gone wrong. Both mother and daughter play piano, but where the mother (Juliette) is simply a piano teacher with average skills, her daughter (Julie) is an actual virtuoso. While Juliette recognizes her daughter's talent, she is deeply jealous as well, having herself dreamt all her life of a career as a pianist. She even goes so far to try to pass her daughter's genius as her own to the outside world. Slowly, Juliette looses control of herself. As you can imagine, this movie won't lead you to outbursts of laughter, but it is very well done and constructed.
Moving on to lighter topics - the closing dinner. It started at midnight, and was held at the swimming pool of the Excelsior Palace Hotel, with a grandiose view of the lights along the coast, mirrored in the bay in front of Taormina - the setting certainly compared very favorably with pool party settings at the Cannes Film Festival such as the Majestic pool, or the pool of the Eden Roc. The buffet dinner was copious and good, so was the wine, and quickly everybody became the friend of everybody else.
Overall, Taormina certainly has all the ingredients that can make a festival great - glamorous hotels, great food, a "screening room" that is hard to beat in originality and beauty (the Greek theatre), and a town full of locals who speak a foreign language.
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