Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet's stage adaptation of Elio Vittorini's seminal anti-fascist novel Conversazione In Sicilia premiered last year at the Buti Municipal Theatre in Italy. It brought lyrical congrats aplenty from luminaries in film and literary circles. "Thank you for giving us such beautiful, lucid moments," wrote Jean-Luc Godard. "They stand out in a dark and stupid world." And after Funny Games director Peter Handke saw the production, he wrote to Daniele and Jean-Marie: "You have discovered, shown, exploded cinema in my heart.

Sicilia! is all your work in one - heightened rage and gentleness."

Born in 1933, Jean-Marie Straub left France for Germany to avoid the draft during the Algerian Crisis and became one of the charter members of the New German Cinema movement. He was joined in exile by Daniele Huillet (born 1936), his lifelong companion and artistic collaborator. Their Machorka-Muff (1962), an adaptation of a Heinrich Boll story, and Not Reconciled (1965), a statement on intellectual unrest during the post-Adenauer era, sparked heated discussion at Cannes and other film festivals. Just as difficult for conventional critics to swallow was Chronicle Of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967), a basically static-camera view of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, selected for the competition at the Berlinale in 1968.

Then an attempt was made to present their static-camera, Greek-arena film version of Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses And Aaron (1974) in a sidebar at Cannes. And because of its dedication to Holger Meins, a Straub colleague at the Berlin Film Academy who was linked to the Baader-Meinhof Group and died in prison of starvation - the pair found it easier to work outside of Germany for a while.

In Sicilia!, Straub and Huillet have Silverio - the alter ego of Italian writer Elio Vittorini (1908-1966) - returning home from the north of Italy after 15 years to visit his mother. Although the novel-play-film is structured as a journey of initiation from childhood to manhood, the original novel served in 1939 as a powerful political metaphor and succeeded in angering many a fascist literary critic. Originally published as a magazine serial, then reprinted three times as a bestseller, it was banned in 1942. Ron Holloway