AKA: O Homem das Estrelas (Brazil)
Marchands de rêves (Canada) (French title)
Der Mann, der die Sterne macht (Germany)
El hombre de las estrellas (Spain)
Marchand de rêves (France)
The Star Maker (UK) / (USA)
L'UOMO DELLE STELLE (aka THE STARMAKER) is a dramatic 1995 movie directed by Giuseppe Tornatore and starring Sergio Castellitto, Tiziana Lodato, Leopoldo Trieste, Leo Gullotta, Clelia Rondinella, Salvatore Billa, Jane Alexander, Tony Sperandeo, Pino Calabrese, Franco Scaldati, Domenico Dolce, Stefano Gabbana, Nicola Di Pinto, Tano Cimarosa, Peppino Tornatore, Antonio Miceli, Vincent Navarra. The movie won 3 David di Donatello, as Best Director (Giuseppe Tornatore), as Best Scenario (Francesco Bronzi), as Best Actor not protagonist (Leopoldo Trieste), and also winner of the Gran Premio Speciale Giuria LII Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica di Venezia. In Sicily 1953, Joe Morelli (Castellitto) rides a truck with a tent and a camera. He introduces himself as representative of a Rome based movie company and invites people to do auditions for the sum of 1500 Liras, promising fame and money and dispensing praise and encouragement to anyone about a possible acting career. In every town his arrival arouses enthusiasm, regardless of age or class. The movie camera attracts flocks and even some bandits who had gone into hiding and a police sergeant, who cannot resist the temptation to be filmed while reciting a passage from the Divine Comedy. But really after a few months, he will unmask Morelli as a charlatan and crook. The film material used is in fact expired and unusable. In addition to the arrest and public ridicule, on the way to prison, Morelli has to undergo even the vengeance of a crime family, to whom he had pretended to filming the funeral and the mourning room of their dean. With the complicity of the police officer, the man is mercilessly beaten and humiliated at the presence of Beata (Lodato), a young girl, hidden until that moment, with whom he was sentimentally related. She felt in love with him, hoping he would take her away from her hometown. Morelli, having served his sentence, starts to searching for her, and finally he found her in a nursing home, irreversibly traumatized for what she had seen. She does not recognize him and hardly talks using only disjointed sentences. Morelli had to retrieve his truck, where Beata had lived with him for a long time, and leave Sicily, thinking of all those deep human experiences inside his tent, and to those specimens, almost always spontaneous, not etched on the film, but imprinted only in his memory. Ennio Morricone composed this symphonic score, where a romantic and sad main theme emerges, and it is developed through poignant atmosphere with performance of violin, flute and guitar. He elaborated with his own arrangement for sax, violin and small ensemble, the classic STARDUST. The music that is heard during the funeral of the mafia boss and during the beating of Joe Morelli is based on a famous funeral elegy for banda dating back to 1933 and composed by Sicilian conductor and composer Maestro Giuseppe Bellisario whose title is MARCIA FUNEBRE, SS. CRISTO ALLA COLONNA. Until now the master tapes of the original sessions are still hidden or maybe they went destroyed, and so we used the stereo master tapes assembled at that time by the composer himself, properly remastered, to produce this CD of 52:11 total time.
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