El rey de la Habana, a novel by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, will be taken to the big screen very son in a film by renowened Spanish director Agustí Villaronga.
Works by Wendy Guerra and Leonardo Padura have already inspired foreign filmmakers that released films based on their texts this year. Now it is the turn of Pedro Juan, one of our most read and published worldwide, author.
Villalonga, winner of several Goya awards, will start shooting this film, for six weeks, in the Dominican Republic next February
Nor the filmmaker or the producers have explained what they would not shoot this movie in Havana, either political or economic. Pedro Juan does not know anything about it, though he regrets it is not possible to shoot the movie in the city that inspire the script.
Life in the municipality of Centro Habana is the starting point and greatest challenge to take it to another scenario. Still without a defined cast, the movie will deal with the problems of Reinaldo, a teenager who just escaped a juvenile center to ram Havana’s streets during the Special Period.
The script is an excellent adaptation by Villalonga.The production and pre-filming are moving forward. They already have the locations and the casting hwere they chose very young actors, none one known. The shooting is expected to start in February. I am very pleased they chose this book for a movie, because is a novel I love ad cost me a lot to write. It is well-known worldwide despite its little run in the US and in some places people reject them because its strong content. Many times censorship skips this book and they prefer to publish other works of mine. Anywhere you publish a conflicting book that tackles the conflicts in society, there is censorship, because editors get scared, he told OnCuba
The filmmaker spent at least two months at the beginning of last year in the Cuban capital studying and looking for locations thought he said he knows the city quite well and had visited many times, but added he needed to return to work on some details. Unfortunately, his pre-filming work in Cuba was in vain.
He has a long career in the movie industry. His film, Pan Negro, became a great hit of the Spanish cinema in 2010. He got nine Goyas for it, including Best Film, Bes Director and Best Script. It was also the Spanish candidate to the Oscar, and Movie National Prize in 2011
The El rey de La Habana will be produced by Luisa Matienzo for Tusitala Producciones Cinematográficas, an independent Catalonian producing house that has 8 movies, with filmmakers like Isaki Lacuesta, José Corbacho, Juan Cruz, Arturo Ripstein and Santiago Carlos Oves.
