09/02/2012

Danish 84-year-old veteran director Henning Carlsen, who was on Sunday (February 5) awarded an Honorary Robert by the Danish Film Academy, is in no way retired from filmmaking after 36 documentaries and 16 features, including Hunger (1966) which won Sweden’s Per Oscarsson a Best Actor award in Cannes.

His latest oeuvre, Memories Of My Melancholy Whores, has been selected for a March 6 gala screening during the Guadalajara International Film Festival in Mexico – a leading showcase for Spanish-language pictures, which takes place between 2-12 March. SF-Film A/S (Denmark) will release the film in Denmark on May 3.

Starring Emilio Echevarría, Geraldine Chaplin, Angela Molina and Paola Medina, Memories... is scripted by Jean-Claude Carrière from Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez’s 2005 book about a 90-year-old reporter who – on the eve of his birthday - decides to give himself ”the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin”.

In Márquez’s first novel in ten years, an old madam procures a 14-year-old girl for him, but their one-night stand turns into a transforming year for the old bachelor, who has always paid for sex, where he relives his adventures and experiences, meeting with ”the miracle of the first love of my life”.

Shot in Mexico during the autumn of 2009, the Danish-Mexican co-production, which will be launched domestically in April, was produced by Denmark’s Nina Crone, of Crone Film, with Mexico’s Raquel Guajardo, Vicente Aldape and Leonardo Villarreal, for Memorias Del Sabio Producciones and Zip Films.

Originally a documentary filmmaker, Carlsen directed – among others - two adaptions of Norwegian author Knut Hamsun, Hunger and Two Green Feathers (1995), also portraying French painter Paul Gauguin in Oviri (1986), selected for Venice. After I Wonder Who's Kissing You Now? (1997) he has concentrated on documentaries.