“Cinema Paradiso” will become a series, know the details
A series about one of the best Italian films of all time, Cinema Paradiso, is in the process of production. The fiction will simply be called paradise and will have the address of Giuseppe Tornatore, the same from the original film, who will also be in charge of writing the script for this new project.
cinema Paradiso told the story of a boy, Totó (played in childhood by Salvatore Cascioin youth by Marco Lonardi and in adulthood Jacques Perrin), who lives in a small (fictional) Sicilian town called Giancaldo, and establishes a fatherly bond and friendship with Alfredo (incarnated by the great Philippe Noiret), the one in charge of placing the film tapes in the projector of the cinema. The film traces the arrival of adolescence and the awakening of the young man’s love and his need to leave small-town life to dedicate himself to being a film director in Rome. The film was praised by critics worldwide and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1990. A year earlier it had won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film managed to raise 12 million dollars at the box office in the United States and had a re-release in the United Kingdom when a restored version of the original was released.
The recently announced series will have six episodes and will tell the same plot that we saw in the movie. “but in an expanded form with several different narrative threads”affirmed the producer of the fiction, Marco Belardi (Perfect strangers, 2016), in a press release. He also commented that Tornatore is in the process of writing the script and it is estimated that it will be ready by 2023. Some of the topics that will be covered in the series according to Belardi are “the strength of a mother, the solidarity of a friend, sex as a taboo, forced relocations, escapes and marked social differences”. Once again we will see the portrait of that post-World War II Italy and the role of cinema in the imaginary of each member of society.
Until now it is unknown what will be the platform that raises this fiction that in principle will be produced by Bamboo, company of Belardi. Everything would give to think that Netflix I would take this content, since the director and owner of the Italian production company has already signed several agreements with the platform to produce between two and three original films from Italy. But so far it has not been confirmed who will distribute the series in the world.
Many have received with considerable suspicion the news of this idea of Tornatore, since for them cinema Paradiso it is magical and untouchable. But the fact of having the same writer and director means that at least we give him an extra quota of trust. But it is also true that in times where spin-offs, prequels and sequels are the order of the day, this new series will be viewed with a very sharp lens so that it does not fall into common places and tries to match the original film.
