Camera D’Or Winner César Díaz, Mutante Cine’s Fernando Epstein Talk ‘The Invisible Ink,’ Seriesmakers Winner
“The Invisible Ink,” a drama from Uruguay’s Mutante Cine co-founder Fernando Epstein (“Whisky”) and Cannes Camera D’Or winning Guatemalan director César Díaz (“Our Mothers”), was first pitched to international markets at last year’s Conecta Fiction & Entertainment’s Co-Pro Series session, where it won double. It retained its momentum as it swept up a €50,000 Beta Development Award last month at Series Mania Forum’s Seriesmakers strand.
“The truth is, when I found out about the award, I was very flattered. We have something strong on our hands,” Epstein told Variety. “I don’t want to fail to mention the excellent program devised by Series Mania and Beta Group, from the virtual talks to each session with our mentors; everything was impressively rich and generous.”
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“For people who’ve never worked on a series, it’s extremely important to have these spaces where we can experiment and learn,” Díaz added.
The eight-part episodic, based on the novels by Uruguayan author Eduardo Mariani, follows two disparate protagonists: Francisco Chopo, a former anarchist, and Blasco Kaplan, a corrupt banker with sinister ties. One feeding gently off the other, the pair are forced back together by dire circumstances that reconnect them to their sordid pasts. Weaving through tumultuous eras, the two reassess their former lives and the bonds they’ve reluctantly yet securely fastened to survive.
“I felt that the novel was very cinematic, but at the same time, too long for a film. That was more than 10 years ago and now with the new possibilities of international exhibition of series, I feel that it’s the moment to carry out this work,” Epstein said.
“We’ll have the necessary time to enjoy what it’s about as a thriller, but also to delve into the philosophical dilemmas our character faces, a person who had to leave everything behind and now, 20 years later, must face the consequences of that decision while escaping from a threat related to his past.”
The series, which teams Uruguay’s Daniel Delmas with Epstein’s Mutante Cine and Géraldine Sprimont of Brussels-based Need Productions, will fuse the shocking underpinnings of South America’s political unrest with the frantic inner workings of the main characters, their morality and sense of selves, sure to yield a broadly familiar and emotionally engaging narrative.
“I found the way in which the book ‘La Tinta Invisible’ deals with the years of dictatorship and repression in Uruguay attractive. It explores, in a provocative way, dark places that even today, more than 50 years later, are difficult for the country to process and that also resonate in the vast majority of Latin American countries,” Dalmas said.
Written by Epstein and Díaz alongside co-scribe Janine Zaruski (“Manny’s Garage Sale: A Hitchcock Knot”), “The Invisible Ink” marks the first foray into television for both Epstein and Díaz, both of whom have been lauded in international film markets. With the story spanning decades, the team plans to honor the novels while seeking a compelling and concise way to unravel their contents for series audiences.
“I think we have to start from the basis that the narration isn’t the same as in a movie. There are many other aspects to take into account: the rhythm, the structure, the definition of the characters, the point of view,” Díaz said.
“The issue of various eras is a dilemma that will surely be resolved on the editing island. For now, we must find a way that in the script feels both organic to the story and rhythmically appropriate so as not to drive the reader crazy with the temporal jumps,” Epstein added. “The different times are very well ordered in the novel, but during the adaptation process the story’s grown and so that structure can serve as a guide, but it will undoubtedly change drastically. It’s one of the items we’ll work hard on in the coming months.”
No stranger to charged cinematic fodder, Díaz is set to direct another intimate portrait of political strife, using the art form to center topical and poignant happenings speaking to the recent past while connecting to current societal tides. Art, once again, imitates life and challenges structures embedded in history books. A revolutionary act in itself, Díaz defined what it means to use art to discuss relevant histories and, in essence, work parallel to dissident social movements to form dialogues around profound events.
“Creating art is as important as protesting, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a form of protest, I think it’s a way of expressing ourselves and, above all, it’s a necessity to talk about these issues,” he said.
“I think that by going deeply into the cinematographic search, we arrive at a type of citizen or political action that makes the gesture resemble a protest, but I don’t think it has the same origin or the same will. The art that seeks to be solely a protest or created around an ideology is an art condemned not to question itself. Deep down, the contexts of the characters serve us to create more tension between them or within them, but the context cannot be an end in itself.”
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