This year’s 66th Venice Film Festival will open September 2 with Oscar-winning Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore’s new film Baaria, it has been revealed. The year’s most expensive Italian production and the first Italian film to open the festival in two decades, Baaria will tell the story of three generations living through the tumultuous 20th century in the director’s hometown in Sicily and is described enigmatically by Tornatore:

“Baaria is an ancient sound, a magic formula, a key. The only one capable of opening the rusty box in which the meaning of my most personal film is hidden. An amusing and wistful story, of great loves and irresistible utopian dreams. A legend thronged with heroes… But Baaria is also the name of a Sicilian town where the people’s lives unfold along the main street. A few hundred metres, no more. But if you walk up and down it for years, you can learn what the whole world will never be able to teach you.”

53-year-old Giuseppe Tornatore has won an Oscar previously for his film Cinema Paradiso (1990), and was nominated again in 1996 for The Star Maker. He also directed Malèna (2000), starring Monica Belluci.