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Guion, adaptación y nuevas formas de contar el cine, an exploration of the cinematographic narrative

With an introduction where the editor Sabina Torres reflects on the nature of the screenplay while receiving one dog after another to see Twin Peaks, the book Guion, Adaptación y Nuevas Formas de Contar el Cine, edited by the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), is considered a diverse exploration of the possibilities in film writing.

Guion

The book is made up of interviews with some of the most important screenwriters of contemporary Mexican cinema, such as Sabina Berman, who explains how Gloria Trevi helped her perfect the Sergio Andrade dialogues, or Paz Alicia Garciadiego, who clarifies that "the screenwriter's only duty is to the film" and not to the adapted material. The long list of Mexican interviewees includes Carlos Carrera, Marina Stavenhagen, Julio Hernandez Cordon, Laura Santullo, Amat Escalante, Roberto Sneider and Natalia Beristain, among other outstanding writers and directors.

Equally important are the interviews with international filmmakers such as Pawel Pawlikowski, Cristian Mungiu, Peter Greenaway, Laurent Cantet, Béla Tarr and Michel Hazanavicius, who share their processes and ideas on the writing of original and adapted scripts of literary works. Mungiu, for example, narrates the process to write his latest film, Graduation (2016), from newspaper articles he archives by subject, while Tarr explains his need to experience the lowlands of Hungary to successfully adapt Satantango (1994).

Literary writers also have a voice in the book. In interviews with Fernando Vallejo, Joyce Carol Oates, Guillermo Fadanelli, Valeria Luiselli, Alberto Chimal and Yuri Herrera, themes from the influence of nineteenth-century literature on conventional cinema and the relationship of a novelist with his adapted works, to the importance of the video game as a narrative language to explore are discussed. This theme expands, by addressing new ways of storytelling in cinema, through inquiries about virtual reality and transmedia projects, which present imminent narrative possibilities.

One more section includes fragments of lectures given by Guillermo del Toro, Stephen Frears, Barber Schroeder, Wash Westmoreland and Laurent Cantet. When discussing the composition of dialogues in a foreign language or the thin division between documentary and fiction, these conversations offer readers answers derived from experience making films, which show a diversity of perspectives as vast as the filmographies of these authors.

To complement each section, characters such as Daniela Michel, director of FICM, German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff and critics Rafael Aviña and Jean-Christophe Berjon contribute with their perspectives on the topics discussed in the interviews to give the reader a general overview and guide them through the various points of view expressed in the book.