24/09/2002 - Stoneraft by George Sluizer is released. The story of a new imaginary peninsula floating freely in the Ocean

Following its excellent reception at the Festival of World Cinema in Montreal in August, Stoneraft (The Stone Raft), the latest film by Dutch director, George Sluizer is to be put on general release in the Netherlands this week. Based on the book by 1998 Nobel prize winning writer, José Saramago, and co-produced by the Netherlands’ MGS Film, Spain’s Sogecine and Portugal’s Lusomundo, Stonecraft is the story of a fantastic journey that two women make in Spain, a country that has become a peninsula drifting in the Atlantic Ocean as a result of a massive earth tremor. Ana Padrão and Iciar Bollain play the two women and Sluizer’s cast also features three men, played by Diogo Infante, Gabino Diego, and Federico Luppi, and a dog. Stonecraft is a political parable about the ways in which people of different cultural backgrounds meet and merge. In the original, the dialogue passes freely between Spanish, French, English and Portuguese. George Sluizer is best remembered for having directed Spoorloos (1988) a film that was remade by Hollywood in 1993 and released as The Vanishing, and an Italo-German co-production called Utz (1992).

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