"It's a project I've had for a long time and comes from my friendship with Ruy, which dates back to the 1970s. (...) It's a film mainly about his relationship with Angola, but telling a great adventure story that is his adventure looking for his father's papers", said producer Paulo Branco to the Lusa agency.
Produced by Leopardo Filmes, the film has a script by José Eduardo Agualusa and is based on the poetry and fiction of writer Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, especially on the trilogy "Os Filhos de Próspero", composed of the works "Os Papéis do Inglês" (2000), "As Paisagens Propícias" (2005) and "A Terceira Metade" (2009).
The film is a personal project by Paulo Branco made with "two extraordinary accomplices", Agualusa, in the script, and Sérgio Graciano, in the direction, having spent ten weeks filming in the Namib Desert, in southern Angola.
"That relationship he had with that absolutely extraordinary space in the Namibe desert and with the local populations, that's what we wanted to convey, making the most of Ruy's work and his own biography", explained Paulo Branco.
Actor João Pedro Vaz plays Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, traveling through Angola in search of some old papers left by his father, in a narrative that diverges into other stories, namely in two characters present in the writer's work: Severo (Carlos Agualusa) and Trindade (David Caracol), who can be seen as the writer's alter egos.
The cast also includes Miguel Borges, Délcio Rodrigues, Joana Ribeiro, Carolina Amaral and Sandra Gomes, among others.
For the producer, the film "Os papéis do inglês" is "a fiction that rarely exists in cinema in Portugal at the moment, in the sense that they are fictions that are reflections on History, on the territory, on the relationships of the Portuguese with that space".
"This film is, therefore, an attempt to translate onto the screen the plurality of an artist who was never limited to a single form of expression," said director Sérgio Graciano in the production notes.
"Os papéis do inglês" reaches around 30 cinemas in Portugal, is guaranteed to be released in November in Angola and is part of the competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival, which starts on the 28th.
Writer and anthropologist Ruy Duarte de Carvalho was born in Santarém in 1941, became a naturalized Angolan in the 1980s and died in 2010 in Namibia, where he lived. He was a multifaceted author, whose work ranged from literature to the visual arts, from anthropology to cinema, which Paulo Branco also produced.
