Santi Amodeo films The Heaven of Animals
- Raúl Arévalo, Paula Díaz, Manolo Solo, Jesús Carroza and África de la Cruz head the cast of the feature film inspired by David James Poissant's book of the same name
The city of Seville and its province were the central locations for The Heaven of Animals, a screen adaptation of the short story collection of the same name written by New Yorker David James Poissant by Santi Amodeo, director of titles such as Astronauts and Doghead, among other, and whose last release was The Gentiles [+see also:
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The Heaven of Animals, the filming of which (in Super 16 mm) finished a few days ago, tells stories about the past and future deceased; those who were, those who will be and those who are leaving us before our eyes. In one of the episodes, Diego (played by Raúl Arévalo), abandoned by his wife, meets Amanda (Paula Díaz), a nineteen-year-old girl with an amputated arm, a trampoline jumper, a bit of a dreamer and a troublemaker. From this encounter a fleeting and magical relationship will be born: a one-armed mermaid and a disoriented man in free fall. In another episode, Fran (Jesús Carroza) and Benicio (Manolo Solo) go to collect the belongings of the recently deceased father of one of them, whom they have not heard from for many years. On the way, they discover that the dead man is someone known in the area as the Lizard Man. There, in that big house in the middle of nowhere, they will come to understand why. And in the third episode, Darío (Diego Portalo) and Gracia (África de la Cruz) are a couple in their twenties who have known each other since they were children. One day she receives a call from the man announcing the end of the world and they have to barricade themselves in the basement: the girl, accustomed to Darío's cyclical crises, accompanies him in his paranoia.
"The idea behind the film was to understand Poissant's stories as our own. Since I read the book I thought of a film and, despite the cultural and geographical differences, I naturally imagined it here, in Andalusia. The writer's way of portraying loss in an emphatic and visceral way fitted in well with the particular way we Andalusians face death", says Amodeo. "On the other hand, some of the stories and atmospheres in the book transported me to places that have always captivated me, such as a large house among the rice fields of the Guadalquivir or one of those nuclei of terraced houses that expanded along the coast in the 1970s, half-empty in winter and bustling in summer", adds the filmmaker, who mentions the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, the films of Robert Bresson, the photographer Maria Svarbova and the comic strip artists Daniel Clowes and Kazuchi Hanawa as references.
The Heaven of Animals is a film produced by Grupo Tranquilo S.L. with the participation of Canal Sur and RTVE and with funding from the Junta de Andalucía. The film will be distributed in Spain by Maravillas Distribuciones Cinematográficas. At present, it has no sales agent attached.
(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)
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