Country: Italy
Year: 2004
Duration: 96'
Aleardo, a rich and absent-minded Italian architect, anchors his boat off the
remote island of Ocana. On this island live three impoverished Portuguese
noblemen - Ilario, Hipolito and Felipe - and a mistreated servant, who is
mysteriously called Iguana. Aleardo, who stays on the island for a night and a
day, is soon drawn into a disquieting intrigue: is Iguana the devil in disguise
or is she an innocent victim who needs to be saved?
"L'Iguana is a symbolic film, a disquieting tale about the corrupting power of
money and the pain of poor and simple creatures. It is the answer to a
challenge: how to represent the unrepresentable. How to translate Ortese's
experimental and mannerist novel into images, its richly imaginative writing in
the abstract sense of literary representation. The challenge induced me to
search instead for the stylization, the ellipsis, the plot. What happens
off-screen. As I was filming, I thought about a fantastic and visionary type of
cinema, a certain dreamlike
atmosphere that Polanski, De Oliveira, Ruiz create." (C. McGilvray)
Biography
film director
Catherine McGilvray
Catherine McGilvray (Rome, 1965) graduated in History of Theater from the University of Sapienza in Rome. She then received a degree in directing from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematogerafia and specialized in writing for cinema and television at the A.F.T.R.S. in Sydney. She has worked for various years with the theatrical company Barberio Corsetti, and has translated literary texts. She is the author and commentator of radio programs for Rai RadioTre. L'iguana is her first full-length film.
FILMOGRAFIA
La strada dei mobili stanchi (doc, 1991), L'Ospite (cm, 1991), Voci di pietra (cm, 1991), Il Cavaliere e la morte (cm, 1993), Descrizione di una battaglia (doc, 1993), Templum gentis flaviae (doc, 1994), Parigi cambia (cm, 1995), Renata Scotto: l'île Opéra (doc, 2000), Il treno per l'Opera (doc, 2001), Aspettando il treno (cm, 2003), L'iguana (2004).