20/03/2008

Dutch actress Monique van de Ven made her debut alongside Rutger Hauer in Paul Verhoeven’s Turkish Delight, his 1973 adaptation of the eponymous Jan Wolkers novel that was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Thirty-five years later, she debuts as a director with Zomerhitte (“Summer Heat”), an adaptation of a recent Wolkers novella that is being released in the Netherlands today.

Zomerhitte was the last prose work from the writer, who died last year, and was typical Wolkers in many ways, combining sex, nature, art, religion and death in a love and crime story set on the island of Texel. The novella had a one-off print run of 750,000 copies and was given as a gift during the 2005 “Week of Books” to anyone who spent over a certain amount on books that week.

Van de Ven’s husband, actor and screenwriter Edwin de Vries, wrote the screenplay, with real-life couple Waldemar Torenstra and Sophie Hilbrand playing the roles of a photographer and a mysterious blonde respectively. Dutch character actor Johan Leysen (who also plays one of the leads in L’été indien, which premiered yesterday in France) co-stars.

Distributor Independent Films is counting on the huge awareness about the book due to its unique form of distribution and the reunion of Van de Ven and Wolkers to draw adults to the cinema. Zomerhitte is being released on 85 screens and also premiered on two screens in Flanders yesterday.

It is by far the largest release aimed at adults this week, with the US thriller Untraceable and the Italian marital drama Giorni e nuvole being this week’s only other adult options on 34 and eleven screens respectively.

Zommerhitte was produced by Mulholland Pictures in co-production with De Vensche, the production company of Van de Ven and De Vries. Commercial broadcaster RTL, the Texel Tourism Board and the Dutch Film Fund also backed the production.