Film Adaptation of 'The Movie Teller': Bérénice Bejo and Daniel Brühl Star

The film adaptation of the novel "The Movie Teller," written by the Chilean author Hernán Rivera Letelier in 2009, is coming to the cinema, starring Bérénice Bejo and Daniel Brühl.

The movie just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

In this novel, Hernán Rivera tells the story of the arrival of cinemas in the towns in the north of his country, just before the emergence of television, their heyday, and decline, following the story of Margarita María in the sixties, a girl with the gift of narrating movies. She begins by describing in incredible detail what she sees on the big screen to her father, who is in a wheelchair, then to her siblings, the rest of the family, and later to an impatient audience.

Directed by the Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig, with a screenplay by Isabel Coixet, Walter Salles, and Rafa Russo, the feature film made its premiere at the special screenings of the recently concluded Toronto International Film Festival, where it was praised as an inspiring drama.

In this adaptation, Bérénice Bejo plays María Magnolia, the wife of a miner from the Atacama Desert (Daniel Brühl), who has a special love for cinema and art in general, prompting her to move to the big city. Her daughter, the young Margarita María, inherits her mother's love for film and possesses a unique gift that provides her community with a respite from the challenges of everyday life. According to TIFF, this film "celebrates our ability to defy even the harshest circumstances, to find love, inspiration, and hope where none of it seems possible."

Scherfig stated to La Vanguardia, "The goal is to do justice to the novel, the screenplay, and a story rooted in reality. This should be a film that characters would want to escape to on a Sunday afternoon, a family of miners who love cinema."

Filmed in northern Chile between March and May 2022, after its run in Toronto, it will be the opening film of the Valladolid International Film Festival (Seminci), taking place from October 21 to 28, and will hit Spanish theaters at the end of the same month. This film is backed by filmmaker Walter Salles, who has been pushing the project for almost ten years.

Translated into more than 18 languages, the novel has also been adapted for the theater. "The Movie Teller," a feature film co-produced by Chile, Spain, and France, is expected to arrive in Chilean cinemas in the first quarter of 2024.

Reactions from TIFF

The Hollywood Reporter, through its critic Pete Hammond, stated that the film is "a charming Chilean cross between 'The Last Picture Show' and 'Cinema Paradiso,'" and it shines not only because of "the power of the films of the time but also because of what cinema and history mean to us and our memories." Likewise, The Wrap asserts that 'The Movie Teller' speaks of "love for cinema and embraces the art of storytelling in a way that is sometimes deeply moving."

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