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‘Land and Shade’s’ César Augusto Acevedo Boards Mauricio Leiva Cock’s ‘Noche sin Fortuna’ (EXCLUSIVE)

César Augusto Acevedo, director of Cannes’ Camera d’Or winning “Land and Shade,” has boarded Fidelio Films’ movie adaptation of “Noche sin Fortuna,” to be directed by Fidelio partner Mauricio Leiva Cock.

Acevedo, Cock and Swiss-Colombian Lony Welter will now co-write “Noche sin Fortuna,” the big screen makeover of the bleak, nihilist novel that revered young Colombian novelist Andrés Caicedo left unfinished when committing suicide in 1977 at the age of 25.

The movie marks a banner title in a strategic development and co-production deal struck by Colombia’s Fidelio Films – which has burst onto the Latin American film-TV scene in the second half of the last decade – and Stories, the burgeoning film-TV arm of Spain-based publishing giant Editorial Planeta.

“Noche de fortuna” is described by Cock as a novel that combines a ferocious critique of social structures in the city of Cali and Colombia at large channeled through recourse to horror genre. He envisages it as a one-day urban road movie about a teen’s going to a girl’s quinceañera 15th birthday party who ends up in the hands of his best friend’s girl-friend, Antigone, who’s a cannibal.

Acevedo is ideal, Cock told Variety, for the tempo of the movie, which he sees as a slowly boiling, moody horror film in the line of Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin.”

For Acevedo, who calls “Noche de fortuna” a novel of “great beauty and horror, polluted by death,” the film’s modern-day setting is crucial.

“The movies I’m interested in making are ones that make us feel more human, allowing us to understand and confront a contemporary Colombian society that seems to care less and less about other people’s pain,” he told Variety.

What’s interesting about the novel, he added, is that its young protagonist doesn’t seek to change the world but simply find a way out – which is presented by Antigone, who offers to eat him alive.

The Camera d’Or is Cannes’ best first feature prize. Written by Acevedo and sold by Pyramide Films, “Land and Shade,” about a Colombian family wrestling a pitiful living out of sugarcane plantation, also won a Visionary Prize and France’s Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers Prize (SACD) at Cannes’ 2015 Critics’ Week.

“Noche de fortuna” will mark Leiva Cock’s follow-up to his own first feature, “Night of the Beast,” the story of the two metalhead friends crossing Bogotá to attend an Iron Maiden concert. Sold by Germany’s M-Appeal, the film is now hitting the festival circuit with selection confirmed for the Athens Intl. Film Festival, Nashville Film Festival and Guanajuato Film Festival.

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