The written word as fuel for creativity is the starting point for some of IndieLisboa’s films, which adapt literary pieces of work to the big screen. Novels, plays and essays are the basis for some of the films which can’t be missed by any literature fans.
Adapted from Corneille’s La Place Royale, Amor Amor (Jorge Cramez) is a comedy which explores certain themes like freedom, romantic relationships and friendship, on a friends’ last day of the year. With an incredible cast of actors – Jaime Freitas, Eduardo Frazão, Ana Moreira , Margarida Vila-Nova and Joana de Verona – this feature film will be screened at Culturgest, on May 7th, 10th and 13th. Hermia & Helena (Matías Piñero) adapts the female characters from the Shakespeare plays, by following a young character who moves from Buenos Aires to New York, in a project which translates A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A story about geographical and cultural distance, at Culturgest, on May 3rd and May 13th. One of the more well known names of today’s Romanian cinema, Radu Jude, tells, in Scarred Hearts, the love story between two patients. A love letter to Max Blecher’s book by the same name, which won the Jury Award at the Locarno Film Festival. Cinema São Jorge, May 4th and May 14th. On the more extreme side, I Am Not a Serial Killer adapts the novel by Dan Wells and builds a supernatural universe which blends genres and softens the graphic gore effects with dry British humour. With Cristopher Lloyd (Back to the Future) and Laura Fraser (Breaking Bad), the film follows the story of a young man with homicidal tendencies. Cinema São Jorge, May 4th.
With their work around the construction of relations between photography and film, Gusztáv Hámos and Katja Pratschke, in Focus in the Silvestre section this year, bring three films which reinterpret literary works: Transposed Bodies, a story about the shared love between two friends who lose their heads in an unfortunate accident, adapted from Thomas Mann; Fiasko, a film inspired by the novel with the same name, written by Imre Kertész (Literature Nobel Prize), about the life of Jewish Hungarian writer and the continuing oppression after the world war; and Cities (Potential Spaces), a fiction about the imagined cities of the future, which modernizes the unique works by Italo Calvino.