"Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet have created a bold and beautiful adaptation of Elio Vittorini's masterwork Conversations in Sicily. Published in 1939 and a bestseller until banned in 1942, the novel narrates the return of an intellectual to his native Sicily after a long absence. The film is structured as a series of dialogue encounters—with strangers in a port, fellow passengers on a train, the protagonist's mother—each of which conceals more than it reveals, emphasizing the distance between what can be seen and felt and what can be expressed. Moving beyond the original's immediate context—the increasing oppression of pre-war Italy—Straub/Huillet offer a moving look at the state of permanent exile common to all of those who can't go home again." — New York Film Festival