What is the right time to announce a new creation? By now, my fellow writer Rogier de Blok and I have spent quite a few years with the story for a new film: The Man from Rome. So by now, we’re so full of the story, we want to share it. As if you’ve met a new friend you want to introduce to everybody. But until there is a strong possibility that the story and then the screenplay will indeed be transformed into a film, it always seems too early to talk about it. (It can be quite hard to introduce people to your imaginary friends, can’t it?).
But now we have a solid draft and the Dutch Film Fund is partnering with IJswater Films and us to develop it further; rewriting, doing artistic research, also with the Director of Photography Melle van Essen and Production Designer Jorien Sont, in Limburg, Belgium, Rome. So now seems a suitable time to share these images from the mood board. And the elevator pitch of the story:
The sceptical priest Filippo (37) is sent by the Vatican to investigate and debunk a crying statue of the Virgin Mary in a border community in Limburg, where four years ago a boy shot and killed eleven of his schoolmates. Attracted and unsettled by the mute young woman Térèse (19) who discovered the tears, he gets entangled in the village’s grief and a series of apparently miraculous events that bring down his certainties about his calling as a priest and as a human being.
