From August 26th to September 8th, Casa del Cinema will host the films in the “Stories of Books” series. The lineup features six films – some based on the works of great writers – in which the protagonists are literature, the passion and mystery of the written word, its power of emancipation, its romantic and rebel nature.
It begins with Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, adapted from the novel of the same name by Robert Harris, a surprising reflection upon the dark nature of power in which the protagonist is a writer grappling with the biography of the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Next comes The Help, adapted from a novel by Kathryn Stockett, which tells the story of three extraordinary women: the aspiring white author Skeeter (Emma Stone) and the African-American help Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer, winner of an Oscar®). The programme continues with Dead Poets’ Society by Peter Weir, dominated by the extraordinary figure of Robin Williams in the role of a brilliant literature professor: the teacher’s nonconformism, the philosophy of carpe diem, the poems of Walt Whitman, Alfred Tennyson and Henry David Thoreau will lead students to question the deeper meaning of their lives. Finding Forrester by Gus Van Sant features the great Sean Connery in the role of a Pulitzer-Prize winning author who, now old and ill-tempered, happens to meet a sixteen-year-old Afro-American and discovers his great literary talent. In The Bookshop, filmmaker Isabel Coixet adapts a novel by Penelope Fitzgerald and reflects on the emancipatory power of culture, on the timeless pleasure of reading and the importance of books in forging identity, both individually and collectively. The programme ends with Fahrenheit 451 by François Truffaut who, inspired by the masterpiece of that name by Ray Bradbury, sets his film in a dystopian future in which books are considered dangerous and are burned.