30 Best Films Set in Sicily

Sicily is not an island. It is a cinematic continent. There is the iconic image the world knows, that of the great masterpieces that made it legendary—and you will find the fundamental pillars here. But this guide is also a counter-mapping. A journey into a different island, an uncomfortable, archaic, and metaphysical character.

The true cinematic Sicily is a purgatory, an open-air theater for the absurd. Auteur cinema has not tried to sell the island, but to understand it, to wrestle a fragment of truth from it. This is not a simple guide, but a path that unites the most famous films with the most radical independent productions.

It is a mapping of gazes: from Visconti’s neorealist class struggle to the metaphysical prison of Rossellini and Antonioni; from the anthropological epic of Vittorio De Seta to the post-atomic nightmare of Ciprì and Maresco. To the emerging directors today who use horror and fantasy to portray an island that is, once again, a laboratory of languages.

The Origins. The Metaphysical Island

Before it became a tourist set, Sicily was the laboratory of Neorealism and the cradle of cinematic Modernism. Auteurs who, working outside of studio logic, used the Sicilian landscape not for its beauty, but for its brutal honesty. The island became the mirror of political struggle, existential imprisonment, and emotional emptiness.

La Terra Trema (1948)

A group of fishermen in Aci Trezza, exploited by wholesalers, tries to break free by going into business for themselves. Their boat and home are mortgaged, but the sea and society turn against them. The attempt fails, leaving them poorer than before, forced to return to work for the same masters they had defied.

A neorealist masterpiece by Luchino Visconti, La Terra Trema is the antithesis of studio cinema. Filmed entirely in Aci Trezza with local fishermen acting in strict dialect (a radical political choice for the time), the film transforms Verga’s novel I Malavoglia into a Marxist epic. Sicily here is not a pleasant place, but an arena of archaic, immobile class struggle. Visconti uses the seascape not for its beauty, but as a symbol of an immutable destiny, a force that gives life and takes it away, mirroring the economic oppression that crushes the protagonists.

Stromboli (1950)

Karin, a Lithuanian refugee (Ingrid Bergman), marries a fisherman from the island of Stromboli to escape an internment camp. However, she finds herself a prisoner of a wild, primitive, and hostile environment, dominated by the volcano. Unable to integrate and terrified by nature and the closed mentality of the islanders, she attempts a desperate escape over the mountain.

Stromboli marks the beginning of the collaboration between Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, but it is above all a groundbreaking work, an “independent” film that blends neorealism and psychological drama. The island is a character. The volcano is not a backdrop; it is the antagonist. Rossellini uses the volcanic Sicily of the Aeolian Islands to represent a state of the soul: it is an earthly purgatory, a place of atonement. Karin’s struggle is not against society (as in Visconti), but against God and Nature, in a metaphysical dimension that only such an extreme landscape could embody.

L’Avventura (1960)

During a boat trip to the Aeolian Islands, a young woman named Anna mysteriously disappears on a deserted islet. Her lover, Sandro, and her best friend, Claudia, begin to search for her. But the search soon turns into an erratic journey across Sicily, during which a relationship, marked by emptiness and alienation, forms between the two.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece and a scandalous film that redefined cinematic narrative. L’Avventura is the quintessence of independent auteur cinema. Antonioni uses Sicily (the Aeolian Islands, Noto, Taormina) in a revolutionary way. He ignores all folkloristic stereotypes and focuses on the desolate geometry of the landscape, which becomes the mirror of the moral crisis and emotional void of the protagonists. Anna’s disappearance, which is never resolved, is the pretext to show the characters’ inability to feel authentic emotions. Antonioni’s Sicily is a metaphysical, arid, blinding space, where the Baroque architecture only highlights the inner decay of the bourgeoisie.

Salvatore Giuliano (1962)

The film opens with the discovery of the body of the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano in 1950 in Castelvetrano. From there, the narrative proceeds in non-linear flashbacks and flash-forwards, reconstructing the events of his life, the Portella della Ginestra massacre, and the complex links between banditry, the mafia, and politics in post-war Sicily, culminating in the Viterbo trial.

A fundamental political work by Francesco Rosi, Salvatore Giuliano is an investigative film disguised as auteur cinema. Rosi, filming in the very locations of the events (Montelepre, Castelvetrano) and using many non-professional actors, creates a work that is the opposite of a biographical film. Giuliano is almost absent, a phantom figure. The real protagonist is the Sicilian landscape: arid, dusty, riddled with bullets. Rosi uses this space to show an island where the truth is unattainable, buried under layers of omertà, corruption, and power. It is a ruthless analysis of Sicily as the epicenter of the unresolved mysteries of the Italian Republic.

The Lost World. The Anthropological Epic of Vittorio De Seta

No one has filmed Sicily like Vittorio De Seta. Described by Pasolini as a “poet of truth” and by Scorsese as “an anthropologist who speaks with the voice of a poet,” De Seta created, between 1954 and 1959, a series of independent Sicilian documentaries (collected in The Lost World) that are pure epic. Shooting in dazzling Technicolor and Cinemascope, he captured a pre-industrial and ritualistic world at the exact moment before its disappearance, creating a true “mythology of toil.”

Lu tempu di li pisci spata (1954)

In the waters of the Strait of Messina, fishermen practice the ancient and dangerous hunt for swordfish. From high on the mast, a lookout scans the sea. Once the prey is spotted, the boats (lontre) give chase. The ensuing fight is a violent, archaic ritual, a duel between man and animal.

This short film is pure visual poetry. De Seta uses saturated Technicolor and the Cinemascope format not to beautify, but to give an epic and almost mythological dimension to a brutal job. The “time of the sword” is a rite repeated for millennia. De Seta focuses on the faces, the ritualistic gestures, and the fatigue, recording the chants and sounds without external commentary. It is a participatory observation that elevates a fishing event to a Greek tragedy, fixing on film a world on the verge of disappearing.

Surfarara (1955)

In the depths of the sulfur mines of the Sicilian inland, men and boys work in inhuman conditions. The documentary follows the miners from dawn as they descend 500 meters underground, extract the rock, and bring it to the surface, in a cycle of toil that seems immutable and infernal.

If Lu tempu was a solar ritual, Surfarara is a descent into hell. De Seta brings his camera to a place of darkness and oppression, documenting an almost feudal exploitation. The Sicily shown here is a thousand miles from any tourist coast: it is an arid, poor interior. The use of sound is masterful: the silence is broken only by the noise of pickaxes, heavy breathing, and melodic chants, which sound more like laments than work songs. De Seta captures the ancestral culture of suffering.

Contadini del mare (1955)

On the coast of Granitola, at dawn, the fishermen prepare for the “mattanza,” the tuna slaughter. The preparation of the nets is meticulous, a collective ritual. The wait is broken by the sighting of the tuna, which are driven into the “chamber of death.” The water turns red in an explosion of ritual violence, which ends with a thanksgiving to God.

Similar in theme to Lu tempu, this film is even more structured like a visual symphony of death. De Seta films the mattanza not with a sensationalist eye, but with the sacredness of a “terrible and deadly rite.” Sicily is an arena where the life-death cycle manifests with primordial violence. The use of rhythmic chants that accompany the fishermen’s efforts transforms the labor into a dance of death. It is anthropological cinema that finds the epic in everyday reality.

Pasqua in Sicilia (1955)

In San Fratello, a town in the Nebrodi mountains, the Easter celebration transforms into a syncretic event. During the Good Friday procession, the passion of Christ is interrupted by carnival-like figures, the “Jews,” who blow trumpets and disturb the ceremony, mixing the sacred and the profane in a chaotic and ancient ritual.

Here De Seta explores Sicilian religious syncretism. The island is not just about work, but also ritual and mysticism. The film documents a form of cultural resistance where pagan and Christian elements merge. De Seta captures the “vitality of an uncontaminated culture” that expresses its worldview through a collective performance. It is a visual analysis of how Sicily has absorbed and reworked religion into a unique and theatrical form.

Pescherecci (1958)

A Sicilian fishing boat leaves the port for a night of fishing. The documentary follows life on board: the casting of the nets, the patient wait, the hauling in of the fish under the light of the lamps, and the return home at the first light of dawn, closing the daily cycle of survival.

Filmed three years after the other Sicilian shorts, Pescherecci shows an evolution in De Seta’s style. Less focused on the ritual violence of the mattanza, it is a more intimate and nocturnal portrait of labor. Sicily here is a space of darkness and waiting. De Seta captures the almost abstract beauty of the lights on the water and the silent exhaustion of the fishermen. It is a testament to the normality of toil, an elegy for a trade that defines the island’s identity.

Parabola d’oro (1955)

In the Sicilian inland, the documentary follows the cycle of the wheat harvest. From dawn to dusk, peasants work under a relentless sun, using sickles and ancient methods. The wheat, the “gold” of the earth, is harvested with gestures that have been repeated identically for centuries, in an arid and blinding landscape.

This film is the terrestrial counterpoint to the films about the sea. The “Golden Parable” is the wheat, but also the parable of biblical toil. De Seta uses the sun-drenched, parched landscape to emphasize the harshness of agricultural work. Inland Sicily is presented as a place “unchanged for centuries,” where the relationship between man and land is still based on a direct, physical struggle. It is the perfect conclusion to the Il mondo perduto cycle, immortalizing the three pillars of archaic Sicily: the mine, the sea, the land.

Palermo Underground. The Grotesque Aesthetic of Ciprì & Maresco

If De Seta sought dignity in the past, Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco documented the end of all dignity in the present. Theirs is the true underground Sicily cinema, a frontal, almost Pasolinian attack on the island’s sweetened image. Rejecting both nostalgia and mafia epics, their Palermo is a “nightmare universe,” a “sewer-world” that is post-apocalyptic. They use the grotesque, decay, and blasphemy as political acts to show a humanity regressed to an animalistic state.

Cinico TV (1989-1992)

A series of short films and sketches made for television (Rai3). Set in a spectral Palermo, they feature recurring characters (like the Abbate brothers or Paviglianiti) caught in surreal, grotesque, and nihilistic situations. All filmed in a grainy, dirty black and white.

Cinico TV is the laboratory where Ciprì and Maresco forged their aesthetic. By bringing the underground to the national television schedule, they dismantled the language of the small screen. Their Sicily is a non-place, an existential periphery populated by “monsters” who mumble absurd phrases. It is the total deconstruction of all folklore, a vision that uses the aesthetic of decay to speak of the philosophical void of contemporary humanity, starting from its epicenter: Palermo.

Lo zio di Brooklyn (1995)

In a desolate, peripheral Palermo, a clan of Dwarfs must protect a phantom “uncle from Brooklyn” from the ambitions of a rival boss, Don Masino. The plot, almost non-existent, is a pretext for a series of grotesque and surreal tableaus that show a humanity in full regression.

The duo’s first feature film is “extreme and radical.” It is a fiercely independent work that brings the aesthetic of Cinico TV to the cinema. Sicily is a “universe of transgressive poverty” photographed in the hallucinatory black and white of Luca Bigazzi. The film is a “2001: A Scum Odyssey,” where the mafia is reduced to a grotesque farce between dwarfs and derelicts. It is the anti-Godfather par excellence: here, power is not epic, it is just squalid.

Totò che visse due volte (1998)

Divided into three episodes, the film is set in a degraded Palermo. The stories intertwine a mafia boss named Totò, a modern “poor Christ” who lives in a cave, and the tale of an old sodomite. It is a raw reflection on religion, sexuality, and misery in a world without hope.

This is their masterpiece and the film that cemented their underground auteur status. Totò che visse due volte was seized for vilification of religion, a clear case of censorship. It is a work that directly attacks Christian iconography, superimposing it onto the “sewer-world” reality of Palermo. The film uses blasphemy as a “poetic gesture” and “political act,” echoing Pasolini. Sicily is a materialist hell, where the “lures of the angelic are brutalized” and there is no possibility of redemption.

Il ritorno di Cagliostro (2003)

A mockumentary that reconstructs the story of the La Marca brothers, improbable film producers who, in the 1950s, tried to create a “Sicilian Hollywood.” Their project culminates in the film “The Return of Cagliostro,” a disastrous work that leads them to ruin.

After Totò, the duo changes register but not substance. This mockumentary uses film history as a metaphor for Sicilian failure. It is a reflection on the “end of cinema” and the impossibility of creating culture in a land that devours its own dreams. Sicily is seen as a place of illusionists and failures, where every attempt at greatness (the “Sicilian Hollywood”) is destined to turn into farce. It is a melancholic and caustic work about the island’s lost cultural identity.

The Island Reimagined. The New Sicilian Independent Cinema

From the 1980s onward, a new generation of independent Sicilian directors began to use the island in innovative ways, moving away from both classic neorealism and the grotesque of Ciprì and Maresco. Sicily became a true laboratory of genres: the mafia-musical, magical realism, existential noir, the urban western, and the anti-naturalistic literary adaptation. The island becomes a flexible stage for exploring identity, desire, and death.

Kaos (1984)

An episodic film by the Taviani brothers, based on Luigi Pirandello’s “Novelle per un anno” (Stories for a Year). The tales (“The Other Son,” “Moon Sickness,” “The Jar,” “Requiem”) are connected by a crow flying over an archaic Sicilian landscape. The film explores superstition, madness, property, and man’s relationship with the land.

Although the Tavianis are established authors, Kaos is a work with a profoundly independent and anti-mainstream spirit. It is an immersion into Pirandello’s Sicily, a magical and cruel peasant world. The Tavianis capture a lunar island, where passions are elemental and superstition governs life. The inland landscape is neither realistic nor touristic; it is a literary landscape, an open-air soundstage where the obsessions of Sicilian identity, poised between madness and lucidity, materialize.

Palombella Rossa (1989)

Michele Apicella, an executive of the Italian Communist Party suffering from amnesia, finds himself playing a decisive water polo match in a pool in Acireale, Sicily. During the game, fragments of his political and personal past resurface as he tries to remember who he is and what he believes in.

Although only partially set in Sicily, Nanni Moretti’s film uses the island as a space of crisis and dissociation. The Sicilian trip for the match becomes a journey into the protagonist’s unconscious. Sicily is not represented realistically, but is the surreal place (a chaotic swimming pool) where political ideology (Communism) short-circuits. Moretti chooses Acireale not for its baroque, but as a periphery of the ideological empire, the perfect place to stage the crisis and loss of identity of the Italian left.

Tano da morire (1997)

Tano Guarrasi, a butcher in Palermo’s Zen district, is brutally murdered. As his family prepares the funeral, the film reconstructs his life and his rise within the mafia. The story, inspired by real events, is told in the form of a pop and grotesque musical, complete with songs and choreography.

Roberta Torre’s stunning debut feature, Tano da morire is one of the most radical and innovative films about the mafia. Produced independently, the film performs a desecrating act: it transforms the tragedy of Cosa Nostra into a musical. The Sicily of Palermo’s Zen district is an absurd stage where bosses and goons sing and dance. This stylistic choice doesn’t trivialize the mafia, but rather demolishes its mythology: it strips it of its tragic aura and reduces it to a pop, kitsch, and deadly farce. It is a powerful cultural deconstruction.

Diario di una siciliana ribelle (1997)

Marco Amenta’s documentary reconstructs the true story of Rita Atria, a 17-year-old girl from a mafia family in Partanna. After the murder of her father and brother, Rita decides to break the omertà and collaborate with Judge Paolo Borsellino, revealing the clan’s secrets.

Before the fictional film, Amenta made this fundamental independent Sicilian documentary. It is a raw work that, through interviews and archival materials, gives voice to a personal tragedy. The Sicily shown is that of the everyday mafia, of the province. The film is crucial because it shifts the focus from the massacres to the witnesses, showing the human cost of rebellion: exile, loneliness, and rejection by one’s own family. It is an intimate portrait of the fight for justice.

Sicilia! (1999)

A man, Silvestro, returns from Milan to his native village in Sicily after many years. There, he has a long and fundamental conversation with his mother about poverty, his father’s infidelity, and their past life. He then meets an orange seller, a knife sharpener, and other characters, in an almost abstract journey.

Based on Elio Vittorini’s Conversation in Sicily, this film by the Franco-German duo Straub-Huillet is the apotheosis of anti-spectacular auteur cinema. Shot in rigorous black and white, with non-professional actors reciting in a non-naturalistic way, the film is the opposite of any folklorism. Sicily is reduced to its essence: arid landscapes and words. Straub-Huillet use the island as a Brechtian stage to make Vittorini’s text resonate, creating a political and philosophical work about memory and the dignity of labor.

Respiro (2002)

On Lampedusa, Grazia (Valeria Golino) is a young mother with a free and “bizarre” spirit. Her non-conformist behavior is not tolerated by the island’s closed community. When her husband, pressured by the villagers, decides to send her to Milan for treatment, Grazia flees and hides in a cave, aided by her son Pasquale.

Produced by Fandango, Respiro is a perfect example of successful independent cinema. Emanuele Crialese uses Lampedusa as a primordial arena. The blinding beauty of the sea and cliffs contrasts with the “oppressive” and cruel mentality of the community. The film has a tone of magical realism, almost a fairy tale. Sicily (Lampedusa) is a place of beauty that does not allow for diversity; Grazia’s freedom (singing Patty Pravo) is a threat that must be neutralized or expelled.

L’isola (2003)

On the island of Favignana, Turi and his younger sister Teresa live out their adolescence. Life is marked by the rhythms of the sea: the “Mattanza,” fishing, and the presence of the prison whose inmates live almost freely. The arrival of summer and newcomers brings turmoil, forcing the young people into a premature maturation.

Costanza Quatriglio’s debut feature, L’isola is a “contemporary fable and documentary.” Presented at Cannes, the film uses Favignana as a microcosm. The island is a “natural prison” not only for the inmates but also for the inhabitants. Quatriglio blends fiction and documentary, showing the harshness of life (the Mattanza) and the speed with which children must “learn the trade.” It is a lyrical and stark portrait of an adolescence lived in a closed place, at the mercy of the sea.

The Sicilian Girl (2008)

A fictionalized version of the story of Rita Atria. After the assassination of her mafioso father and brother, seventeen-year-old Rita decides to seek revenge by turning her diaries over to the justice system and collaborating with a judge. This choice forces her to break with her family and live under protection.

Ten years after his documentary, Marco Amenta returns to the story of Rita Atria with a fiction film. Although the production is more structured (Italian-French), the approach remains independent. The film deconstructs the mafia from a woman’s point of view. Sicily is seen through the eyes of a girl who rejects its code of honor. It is an important film because it shifts the mafia narrative from the epic of bosses to the personal tragedy of those who choose justice.

Viola di Mare (Purple Sea) (2009)

In 19th-century Sicily, Angela and Sara live a lesbian love story. To save the relationship and protect it from scandal, Angela’s father forces her to disguise herself as a man, turning her into “Angelo.” She will live the rest of her life with a male identity, in a patriarchal world that cannot conceive of her desire.

Directed by Donatella Maiorca and based on the novel Minchia di re by Giacomo Pilati, Viola di Mare is a crucial independent film for how it uses Sicily’s past to talk about gender identity. The nineteenth-century island is an archaic place, dominated by absolute patriarchy. The film shows Sicily as a rigid system of social rules where the only path to freedom is total dissimulation. The island, beautiful and wild, becomes a prison for female and queer identity.

Via Castellana Bandiera (A Street in Palermo) (2013)

In Palermo, two women driving two cars face off in a narrow street, Via Castellana Bandiera. Neither Rosa, in the car with her partner, nor the old, stubborn Samira, wants to reverse. What begins as a trivial traffic jam transforms into a mute, existential, and almost western-like duel that lasts all day and night.

The directorial debut of playwright Emma Dante, the film is an open-air chamber piece. Produced by Vivo Film and Wildside, it is an independent film that transposes Dante’s theater into cinema. The Palermo street becomes a stage for the absurd. Sicily is a place where atavistic stubbornness and pride turn a banality into a tragedy. Dante analyzes the female condition and subalternity, in a duel that is both realistic and profoundly metaphorical.

Salvo (2013)

Salvo is a hitman for the Palermo mafia. He enters a house to kill a boss and finds Rita, the blind sister. After the murder, Salvo points the gun at her, but a miracle happens: Rita regains her sight. Shaken, Salvo kidnaps and sequesters her, beginning a journey that will lead him to question his own life.

The first feature by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, Salvo is a noir that transcends the genre. A winner at Cannes, the film uses the mafia as a context, but the heart of the story is a “magical” event. Sicily is a dark labyrinth, photographed by Daniele Ciprì with an aesthetic that merges the ultra-realism of stakeouts with the metaphysical. It is a film about grace and the possibility of redemption in a world dominated by violence, where sight (and awareness) is a dangerous miracle.

L’attesa (The Wait) (2015)

In an old Sicilian villa on the slopes of Mount Etna, Anna (Juliette Binoche) awaits her son, Giuseppe. Unexpectedly, Jeanne, his French girlfriend, arrives. But Giuseppe is not there, and Anna, unable to reveal a terrible truth, tells the girl he will be back soon. The two women begin a suspended cohabitation, waiting for Easter.

The debut feature by Piero Messina, a student of Sorrentino, L’attesa is an independent film with an international feel. Loosely inspired by Pirandello, the film uses Sicily in an almost spectral way. The villa is a place out of time, shrouded in the fog of Etna. Messina uses the mysticism and rituals of Easter not for folklore, but to create an atmosphere of metaphysical waiting. It is a film about grief and self-deception, where the Sicilian landscape becomes the projection of an inner state of mind.

Emerging Gazes and International Visions

The final section explores the most recent trends, which confirm the vitality of the Sicilian independent scene. A double trend is noticeable. On one hand, foreign underground films in Sicily use the island for its apocalyptic and primordial value. On the other, a new generation of emerging directors from Palermo and Catania are appropriating “low” genres (horror, fantasy, animation) to tell local stories with a universal language.

Confino (2016)

An animated short film. In Sicily during the fascist period, a shadow puppet artist is sent into “confino” (exile) on a remote island after daring to mock Mussolini during a show. There, in solitude, he will use his art to resist and find a form of freedom.

The multi-award-winning independent short film from Sicily by Sicilian director Nico Bonomolo is a gem of independent animation. It is significant because it uses a technique (animation) rarely associated with Sicily to tell a story of political resistance. The prison-island, a recurring theme (see L’isola or Stromboli), is here a metaphor for fascist exile. Bonomolo uses the visual poetry of shadows to show how art (cinema itself) can be a tool of freedom even in the most total isolation.

Dio non ti odia (Lord Doesn’t Hate You) (2019)

A tormented young man, afflicted by a spiritual crisis and disturbing visions, struggles to find his place in the world. His descent into madness or a supernatural reality is set in an oppressive, rural Sicily, where the line between faith, superstition, and psychological horror is blurred.

Directed by the emerging Bagheria-based director, Fabrizio La Monica, Dio non ti odia is an example of the new Sicilian underground wave. Founder of Kàlama Film, La Monica operates in low-budget genre cinema (defined as “drama-horror-fantasy”). This film uses Sicily not for its sun, but for its shadows. It is a psychological horror that uses the local landscape to explore universal themes like guilt and faith, demonstrating the vitality of a scene that expresses itself through new languages.

Io sono Lucia (I am Lucia) (2022)

The film by Catanian director Danilo Arena tells the story of a young Chinese woman who arrives in Sicily, intertwining her story with that of a local poet. The film explores themes such as identity, integration, and the clash between different cultures, against the backdrop of contemporary Sicily.

Awarded at various independent festivals, Io sono Lucia represents an important strand of new Sicilian cinema: the story of multicultural Sicily. Director Arena moves away from classic themes (mafia, archaic past) to focus on the present and the encounter (or clash) between local culture and new migrations. It is independent cinema that uses the island as a social laboratory, questioning what “Sicilian identity” means in the 21st century.

The End (2024)

A post-apocalyptic musical. A wealthy family survives the end of the world in a luxurious underground bunker. The delicate balance of this ritualistic life is shattered by the arrival of a girl from the outside, who brings with her the reality of the destroyed world and fractures the family dynamics.

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon, The End is a major international auteur production that chose Sicily for a specific reason. The film’s underground bunker was shot in the Raffo mine, in the heart of the island. This choice is symbolic: Sicily is no longer just the island of the sun, but, as De Seta had already sensed in Surfarara, it is a “subterranean” place, an earthly womb. Oppenheimer uses Sicilian geology as a location for a film about the end of humanity, transforming the island into the last apocalyptic refuge.