12/18/2014

Eisenstein in Guanajuato selected for official competition of 65th Berlinale International Film Festival!

EISENSTEIN IN GUANAJUATO, the new film by Peter Greenaway, is selected for the official competition of the 65th Berlinale International Film Festival. It's been ten years since the last Dutch movie was selected for a Golden Bear.

EISENSTEIN IN GUANAJUATO is a feature film about the world's greatest filmmaker, with Finnish actor Elmer Bäck (known from THE SPIRAL) playing the title role of the Soviet film-director Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein's talent, insight and wisdom can surely be measured with that of Shakespeare and Beethoven, and his films STRIKE, BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN and OCTOBER established his fame. The film EISENSTEIN IN GUANAJUATO tells of how Eisenstein, curious about Guanajuato's Museum of the Dead, spends ten days in that Mexican city in 1931 whilst he was trying to make the film QUE VIVA MEXICO. His sensual and emotional experiences with sex and death in those ten days influence his later films, introducing a much greater sympathy for the human condition in his cinema.

This international co-production is led by producers Bruno Felix and Femke Wolting from Submarine, San Fu Maltha from Fu Works and Cristina Velasco from Paloma Negra Films (Mexico).

The festival takes places from February 5 '15, and is known as one of the most important film festivals in the World.

Peter Greenaway: "At a time when cinema is dying, it may be appropriate to memorialize Sergei Eistenstein, cinema's greatest film practitioner. It is for me personally gratifying that this film should be selected for the main competition of the Berlinale, in a city which was among the very first to appreciate Eisenstein's greatness."