05/11/2015 - While promoting Oscar hopeful Baby(A)lone in the USA, producer Donato Rotunno is also involved in new projects, including Rudolf van den Berg’s A Real Vermeer and Yilmaz Arslan’s Raqs

Producer Donato Rotunno (© Ricardo Vaz Palma)

Production outfit Tarantula Luxembourg, led by producer and director Donato Rotunno, is currently working on several new projects, among them the Dutch-Belgian-Luxembourgish co-production A Real Vermeer [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and a film named Raqs.

A Real Vermeer is the new film by Dutch director Rudolf van den Berg, who is also writing the script alongside Jan Eilander. The film follows a painter from the 1920s Amsterdam art scene, whose talent is underrated by the local critics, as he paints in the style of his idols, Rembrandt and Vermeer. The painter soon starts to forge works by Vermeer and gets caught in a web of lies and deceit until one day Nazi Hermann Göring contacts him, looking for a Vermeer for his private collection. Tarantula got on board along with Dutch companies Rinkel Film, Fu Works, Cadenza Films and Belgian outfit Living Stone. The film has recently been granted €350,000 from Eurimages, and principal photography is expected to kick off in December.

Raqs marks the return of Turkish director Yilmaz Arslan, an “atypical filmmaker”, according to producer Rotunno, who co-wrote the script with Arslan. The film is set in the 1980s, when several haemophilic patients contracted HIV. Miraculously, some of them survived, and the film tells the story of one of those who did. “It is a very personal story, based on things that Arslan lived through and on the people he met. It is also a sort of tribute to Fassbinder and Pasolini. We hope to shoot it in 2016,” explained Rotunno. Arslan received the Silver Leopard at Locarno back in 2005 with Fratricide, which was already produced by Rotunno.

Meanwhile, Tarantula has recently been involved in the production of Belgian director Stephan Streker’s third film, Noces [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Stephan Streker
film profile], principal photography for which has already wrapped, and Rotunno is busy promoting his own film as a director, Baby(A)lone [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Donato Rotunno
film profile], in the US. The movie, which was produced by another Luxembourgish outfit, Iris Productions, is Luxembourg’s entry for the 2016 Academy Awards (read more).