EXCLUSIVE: WIDE strikes French deal for Panorama title The Parade.
Serbian director Srdjan Dragojevic’s next project will be an adaptation of Julian Barnes’ 1992 novel The Porcupine. The film will shoot in English with an international cast.
(Meanwhile, WIDE Management has closed a French all-rights deal on his Berlinale selection The Parade with Sophie Dulac Distribution. The distributor plans a release by mid-December.)
Producers will be Biljana Prvano vic from Belgrade’s Delerium and Mike Downey and Sam Taylor from the UK’s Film and Music Entertainment (F&ME) with Eva Rohrman from Slovenia’sForum Film and Vladimir Anastasov from Macedonia’s Sektor Film, the team behind Dragojevic’s Berlin Panorama title The Parade.
Set in a post-communist fictional country, The Porcupine is a political thriller about the trial of a former communist leader.
Dragojevic and UK writer Geoff Cox (who was script editor on John Hillcoat’s The Proposition) adapted for the screen.
The film will shoot in the former Yugoslavia.
Dragojevic says: “Barnes’ The Porcupine examines a recent phenomenon in Eastern Europe: nostalgia for Socialism. The script treats this nostalgia as a screen, a strategy to cover up the twin traumas shared by all East European societies: the trauma of socialism and the trauma of transition. Add to this the failure of capitalism since Barnes wrote the book - and we have a very contemporary tale of two systems.”
Downey added that the story “has a powerful contemporary resonance for a novel written 20 years ago.”
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