SNAKE – adapted by Tracey Farren from her own novel – to close the Joburg Film Festival 2024

We are delighted to announce that SNAKE – the film adaptation of Tracey Farren’s haunting and riveting novel, published by Modjaji Books in South Africa – has been selected as the closing film for the 2024 Joburg Film Festival. The film will make its bow on Sunday, 3 March 2024 at the Theatre on the Square, in Mandela Square Johannesburg. Tickets for the premiere are available now.

A talented screenwriter as well as novelist, Tracey previously adapted her novel WHIPLASH for the 2016 film and wrote the screenplay for SNAKE herself in collaboration with director Meg Rickards. The film was a co-production between Known Associates Entertainment and Boondogle Films.

Now in its sixth year, the Joburg Film Festival (JFF) is one of Africa’s premier film festivals, curating and showcasing both African and International films whilst providing youth, aspirant and established filmmakers, and industry professionals with various opportunities for development, training, skills transfer and networking. Coinciding with the celebration of 30 years of democracy in South Africa, the 2024 festival will be staged under the theme of INSPIRING STORYTELLERS – a banner under which SNAKE is fittingly launched.

When Jerry, an alluring stranger, arrives on the farm where Stella lives, her father stays sober and her mother begins to laugh again – but the man with the silver cross has not come to save them. As Jerry slithers his way into their hearts, his own dark wounds begin to show. Stella must choose: shut up and watch him strangle her family – or use the truth to fight for their lives.

Credit: Karin Schermbrucker

About Tracey Farren

Tracey Farren lives in False Bay with her partner, some dogs and children of a range of ages. She has a psychology honours degree from UCT. She started out as a freelance journalist, publishing on a range of social issues before turning to fiction. In 2008, she published her first novel, WHIPLASH (Modjaji Books). She won a White Ribbon award from Women Demand Dignity and WHIPLASH was short listed for the Sunday Times Fiction Award. Modjaji Books also published SNAKE in 2011 and Kwela Books and Titan Books published THE BOOK OF MALACHI in 2020.

Tracey adapted WHIPLASH into a film, TESS, which was produced by Boondoggle Films and released in 2016. TESS won multiple major awards at the Durban International Film Festival including Best South African Feature Film, Best Actress, and Best Editing. The film was also drew awards for Best Actress, Best Editing and Best Cinematography at the Silwerskermfees, the Silver Screen Festival for films with Afrikaans content.

Praise for the novel SNAKE

‘Many crime writers could learn from her … an extremely original literary crime novel.’ — Sarah Lotz, author of THE THREE

‘Tracey Farren has shown in her first novel WHIPLASH that she has a true gift for getting into the hearts of very ordinary people while astutely setting the South African socio-political context. In SNAKE she does it again, even better... An absolutely riveting read.’ — Jane Rosenthal, Mail & Guardian

‘The book is a kaleidoscope of the weird and wonderful...’ — Beth Shirley, The Sunday Independent

Follow Tracey Farren on X (formerly Twitter)

New 4K Restoration of Gilbert Adair’s THE DREAMERS to Receive UK Premiere at the British Film Institute

Image: Recorded Picture Company

We are delighted to announce that THE DREAMERS – the 2003 film adapted by the late Gilbert Adair from his own novel, and directed by Academy Award-winning Bernardo Bertolucci (THE LAST EMPEROR, LAST TANGO IN PARIS) – has been restored in sparkling 4K quality, and will receive its UK premiere next month at the BFI Southbank.

Tickets to the premiere on 27 February are available now on the BFI website (18:10, BFI Southbank). The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Bernardo and Gilbert’s collaborator, Recorded Pictures Company producer Jeremy Thomas. The film will also be re-released on 4K Ultra-HD Blu-Ray on 22 April 2024, and is available to pre-order now.

THE DREAMERS is an evocative, sensual and disarmingly nostalgic portrait of three young cinema lovers caught up in the political turmoil of 1968 Paris. Originally published as THE HOLY INNOCENTS in 1988, Gilbert simultaneously reworked the material for both the film script and a new version of the novel, retitled THE DREAMERS, which was published in the UK by Faber & Faber. The film, starring Eva Green (CASINO ROYALE), Louis Garrel (LITTLE WOMEN) and Michael Pitt (BOARDWALK EMPIRE) first premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2003, winning rave reviews from the likes of Roger Ebert, Philip French and Peter Bradshaw.

THE DREAMERS was restored in 4K by Cinetica Bologna in collaboration with Recorded Picture Company, the production company behind the film. The technical work was done by L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory from the original negatives, and had its world premiere as part of Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in July 2023, in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore. The screening was introduced by producer Jeremy Thomas, with Academy Award-nominated director Luca Guadagnino (CALL ME BY YOUR NAME), and actress Marisa Paredes (LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL).

THE DREAMERS is set in Paris, Spring of 1968: the city is beginning to emerge from hibernation and an obscure spirit of social and political renewal is in the air. Yet Théo, his twin sister Isabelle and Matthew, an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinémathèque Française. Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen.

Denied their nightly 'fix' when the French government suddenly orders the Cinémathèque's closure, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed universe of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium.

Image: Lin Leong

About Gilbert Adair

A cultural observer, journalist, broadcaster, critic, translator, screenwriter and award-winning novelist, Gilbert Adair wrote regular columns for The Sunday Times, Esquire, and Independent on Sunday. He died in 2011.

His books have been published on both sides of the Atlantic and translated into twenty languages. Amongst his finest achievements were his novels THE DREAMERS, which Gilbert adapted himself for the ‘extraordinarily beautiful’ (Roger Ebert) 2003 film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, and LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND (adapted for the screen by Richard Kwietnieowski in 1997, with John Hurt playing the leading role) as well as his translation of Georges Perec’s LA DISPARATION, published in English under the title A VOID and achieved, like the original text, without use of the letter ‘e’.

Praise for the film THE DREAMERS

‘Director Bernardo Bertolucci has simply given us his best picture for many years, working from an elegant, urbane screenplay by Gilbert Adair… Watching this film is like drinking a bottle of good red wine, all at once, on an empty stomach. Not good for you, but wickedly pleasurable all the same.’ – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

‘An evocative reminiscence of an era when cinema and politics could count for as much as carnal passion.’ – Time Out

‘A brilliant critic, pasticheur and aphorist, Adair is one of those Scots who have bypassed English metropolitan culture and have become very much at home in the French literary and intellectual tradition… Adair has now adapted his novel for the screen as THE DREAMERS, and as his novel is about politics, transgressive sex and the cinema itself, he has found a perfect collaborator in Bernardo Bertolucci… an amusing, sophisticated movie, true to its times, cheerfully erotic, and played with unselfconscious conviction by its three young actors.’ – Philip French, The Observer

‘Disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting.’ – A. O. Scott, The New York Times

‘A masterpiece’ – The Telegraph

‘Sexy and Provocative.’ – Dazed and Confused

‘He writes … as if he were making a thousand angels dance on the head of a pin.’ – Kevin Jackson, Independent on Sunday

Star-studded cast announced for Greg Latter's post-World War Two drama ME, YOU

Image Credit: Cristaldi Pics

As reported by Variety, ME, YOU, a feature film written by Greg Latter, adapted from the novel TU, MIO by Erri De Luca, will feature BAFTA-winning star of REV and ABOUT TIME, Tom Hollander, and Academy Award-nominated star of 127 HOURS and THE DISASTER ARTIST, James Franco. Legendary Danish Director Billie August, whose 1987 film PELLE THE CONQUEROR won the Palme d'Or, and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is attached to direct.

Set in 1955, ME, YOU tells the story of Marco, a 16-year-old boy with an Italian mother and English father (played by Hollander), who spends his summers on the Italian island of Ischia.  Marco befriends Nicola (played by Franco), a former GI turned fisherman, who regales Marco with stories from the war. Soon Marco also meets and falls for 20-year-old Caia, a Romanian Jewish orphan whose father threw her out of a train in Yugoslavia to prevent her from being taken to the camps. Marco’s friendship with Caia makes him examine his own trauma from the war, and, desperate to win Caia’s heart, Marco vows to take revenge on the SS by plotting against a group of German tourists on the island.

Daisy Jacob (EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE) also stars as Caia. Principal photography is set to begin in September 2022 on location in Ischia.

About Greg Latter

Greg is an award-winning South African writer and director who has worked all over the world. He is the recipient of the Thomas Pringle Award for Creative Writing (1982), the Sithengi Best Screenplay Award (2005), the SAFTA Best Screenplay Award (2007) and the Naledi Best Play Award (2011). In a career spanning 35 years, he has had 22 feature films, 11 television series and 5 plays produced.

Greg has worked with director Billie August several times before, including most recently on his highly praised feature NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON, which starred Jeremy Irons as the lead.

Nick Brown’s Cold War thriller ANGEL THREE begins shooting in Ontario

Credit: Anita Doran - @electrospirit - on Instagram

ANGEL THREE – novelist Nick Brown’s first screenwriting credit – has this week started filming in Ontario, Canada. The production will be overseen by director Anita Doron, the writer of the Oscar-nominated animated film The Breadwinner.

Starring Nahéma Ricci (Antigone), ANGEL THREE is a thriller set in 1987 Berlin – a divided and dangerous city – and follows an agent who must cross city lines in order to deliver a crucial witness and a priceless document to safety in the west.

The film is being produced by Bunk 11 Pictures and Genco Pictures, and will be released in 2023.

About Nick Brown

Nick Brown found initial success with his Agent of Rome novels. Described by The Times as 'gripping', the critically acclaimed series has now reached six volumes and has been translated into Spanish and Dutch. 

Now working as a freelance writer, Nick has 'ghosted' a number of screenplays in a variety of genres, from science fiction to family drama. Several of his own scripts have been optioned, with ANGEL THREE the first to enter production.

Nick’s screenwriting is represented by Julian Friedmann.

Trailer released for SUPERVISED written by Andy Briggs

The trailer for the new film SUPERVISED has been released, watch it here!

SUPERVIZED tells the story of an elderly group of international superheroes retired to Dunmanor nursing home in Ireland. Ray is the once world renowned ‘Maximum Justice’ who as his nom de plume suggests will fight bad with good till the cows come home. He finds it hard to accept that his hero days are over and now it’s bingo games and blanket baths. His old team consisting of trusted sidekick Ted AKA ‘Shimmy’, old flame Madera ‘Moonlight’ and rival at everything Pendle ‘Total Thunder’ are far more accepting of their undignified destiny. When Jerry, ‘Rainbow Warrior,’ dies after having his superpowers ‘downwardly managed’ for the safety of others, a federation sectioned procedure, Ray suspects foul play and decides to investigate. The rest of the gang is not so convinced, and Ray finds himself battling against not only his enemies, but the stigma and restrictions of old age.

Releases July 19th