Hajdu adapts Dostoevsky’s The Gambler

by Fabien Lemercier

24/02/2011 - After Sticky Matters (Best Debut Feature at Hungarian Film Week 2002), Tamara (2004), White Palms [trailer, film focus] (Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 2006) and the multiple award-winning Bibliothèque Pascal [trailer, film focus] (unveiled in the Berlinale Forum 2010), Hungarian filmmaker Szabolcs Hajdu is currently shooting The Gambler in Las Vegas. For this loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, the director has reunited with the actors from his previous film, including Romanian thesps Andi Vasluianu, Ion Sapdaru and Oana Pellea, Hungarian actress Orsolya Török-Illyés and Shamgar Amram.

Scripted by Hajdu, the film charts the misadventures of a rich family from Eastern Europe whose misguided perceptions of American ways and customs will lead them to lose their dignity and self-respect. The film will focus on the psychological portrait of the Eastern European man through the prism of complicated human relationships and passionate affairs of the heart, set in the turbulent world of casinos.

The Gambler is produced for a small €0.7m budget by the director’s brother Zoltán Miklós Hajdu for US company Art Films and Andrea Taschler for Hungary-based Mirage Film Studio. It is lensed by DoP András Nagy, the director’s regular collaborator. Hajdu also has his Mirage project in the pipeline (see news).

(Translated from French)