Guernica, 33 days: A film by Carlos Saura
I don’t say it very often, well, maybe I never said it at all, but I am very grateful to EITB for letting me use a bit of their digital real state for my ramblings and stories. I like sharing the things that make me happy, make me laugh, or make me mad. I also enjoy keeping people up to date with news about the Basques I find interesting.
Sometimes, the very people I try to keep informed turn around to fill me in on information I have missed. Like last night at the Euzkaldunak monthly dinner in Boise’s Basque Center, when David Lachiondo, Interim Director of the Basque Studies Program at BSU, told me about the new movie by Carlos Saura, Guernica, 33 days, which recounts the story of famous painter Pablo Picasso and it’s being shot in the town of Gernika, Bizkaia.
The movie will feature Antonio Banderas as Picasso, and Gwyneth Paltrow as Dora Maar, the painter’s lover. It is a film about Pablo Picasso’s emotional upheaval during the painting of “Guernica” in 1937. To be titled “33 Dias” (33 Days), the movie will be produced by Elias Querejeta, who has worked with Saura on 11 previous occasions. The script was written by the octogenarian duo with the French writer Louis-Charles Sirjacq. One of contemporary cinema’s greatest cinematographers, Vittorio Storaro, will work for the seventh time with Saura. Variety reports that “33 Dias” is budgeted at $7.7 million and will be filmed next summer in Paris and in Guernica in the province of Biscay. Picasso’s monumental black, white, and grey mural, the most famous anti-war painting in the world, depicts the anguish and suffering of the people of the ancient Basque town following its bombardment by planes of the German Luftwaffe Condor Legion supported by Italian aircraft on the afternoon of April 26, 1937.
For more information about the project, check out the movie’s 17-page press book, or visit their website (mostly in Spanish), here.
