At the Taormina Film Festival hosted in Sicily, the festival has awarded a lifetime achievement award to American film director Martin Scorsese, whose family background traces back to the Italian island. Scorsese had recently visited the island back in 2024, where he began filming a documentary on the discovery of a sunken wreck in the island’s waters that had occurred in 2020. The wreckage originates from the third century A.D. and has been dubbed the Marausa 2, for the coast that it was found in, and to reflect a similar shipwreck discovery that was made in that region back in 1999. While Scorsese was working on that project, he happened to make a pilgrimage to Polizzi Generosa, where his father’s family lived prior to immigrating to New York City at the beginning of the 20th century.

In Sicily, Scorsese has also been filming projects such as Aldeas – A New Story, a documentary to feature one of the last full-length interviews by the recently departed Pope Francis, and season 2 of Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints. Scorsese’s passion for his heritage can be witnessed in other documentaries that he has produced, particularly the four-hour-long documentary My Voyage To Italy, where Scorsese takes the audience on a trip through the history of Italian cinema that had personally influenced Scorsese. There, Scorsese guides a viewer to the stalwart Italian directors of the mid-20th century, including Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Roberto Rossellini, the last of who posthumously became Scorsese’s father-in-law for a brief period when Scorsese was married to actress and recent Oscar nominee Isabella Rossellini.

Scorsese connects being in the Sicilian region to his own experience growing up in an Italian-American neighborhood in New York City. As he describes in his own words, the basis of his character and interests is Sicilian: “So much of the foundation is Sicilian…But I can’t get away from where I come from.” Likewise, the documentary work Scorsese has been filming in the Sicilian land, much of it dealing with religious subject matter, functions as another way for Scorsese to reflect on his ethnic and social roots. These themes, which have permeated through his 58 years of film directing, are, as Scorsese himself states, “the roots” of his “fascination.”