The film, which received a 10-minute standing ovation at last year's Cannes Film Festival, and is set in the mid-1990s, is really about a 12-year-old girl, Luna (Julia Jedlikowska), who falls in love with a 13-year-old boy, Giuseppe (Gaetano Fernandez). The girl comes from a middle-class family. The boy comes from an upper-class family. Then he disappears. He stops coming to school or riding his dark horse near the Sicilian village. Where is he? Luna loses her mind looking and longing for him. Her heart is broken. She throws herself into a lake. But there is more to the story. The missing boy's father is tied to the Mafia. And so, on the surface, Sicilian Ghost Story is just another crime movie. But the work was filmed not like a thriller but like a terrifying fairy tale. It is the fairy-tale mood that makes this movie special. There is the old and twisted tree deep in the woods, where all that shines is a sinister sun. There are the pagan ruins by the sea with all of their monster-sized bones and long-forgotten dead. There is the wizard-like man fucking the witch-like woman in a crumbling house that has a basement filled with funereal water. Even the girl's mother seems evil, emerging sometimes from a sauna like a bride of Satan emerging from a room in hell. by Charles Mudede