Walking to Paris
Walking to Paris is an upcoming biographical drama film directed and written by Peter Greenaway. It is devoted to an 18-month journey through Europe, by Constantin Brâncuși, at the beginning of the 20th century. The film is not a documentary, nor is it a biographical film, but rather a fiction imagined by the British director from a real fact about which hardly any details are known.
Synopsis
The film is devoted to the journey of a young 26/27-year-old artist destined to become famous, Constantin Brâncuși, traveling through Europe. He leaves Romania, where he was born and began studying fine arts, to Paris, where he wishes to deepen his training. This journey is a historical fact, covering over 2,500 kilometers on foot across Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and lasting 18 months. However, the details of this adventure remain unknown. Peter Greenaway has crafted a cinematic fiction from this trip, imagining comic or violent adventures, sometimes sexual and sometimes romantic. The reconstituted peregrination is also marked by the construction of sculptures using materials found along the way.Cast
- Emun Elliott as Constantin Brâncuși
- Paolo Bernardini as Constantin Brâncuși
- Andrea Scarduzio as Constantin Brâncuși
- Jacopo Uccella as Constantin Brâncuși
- Carla Juri as Lucy
- Remo Girone as son of Brâncuși
- Marcello Mazzarella as Auguste Rodin
- Anthony Souter as Jonathan Art Historian
- Manuela Biedermann as Vittoria
Production
Filming
The winter sequences were shot in Switzerland in 2015, and the summer scenes in 2016 and 2017, in Switzerland and Italy. Filming was completed in 2019 and the film has been in post-production ever since.Post-production
In December 2022, Greenaway stated that post-production on the film had still not been completed; that it was "languishing in a laboratory in Rome", and that he had moved on from the project, saying:It got chewed up and regorged and reconsidered by a whole group of producers who are still arguing about finishing it. We still have to dub it, we still have to create it, etc. As far as my creativity on the film is concerned, it's completely finished now and has been for about two years, but it's very difficult to wrestle this wretched phenomenon out of the hands of warring producers. There is some talk about it maybe being ready for the Berlin Film Festival, but we're onto other things because I can't hang about waiting for these producers to make their minds up.