Majorcan directed and located film released

“KOVAK'S box”, the latest feature film by Majorcan director Daniel Monzon, was released this week in Sitges in the Official section of the International Festival of Cataluña. Filmed in Majorca, the movie is about a fiction writer who enters one of his novels by accident and various characters commit suicide after listening to the song “Gloomy Sunday”. “The island is a marvellous background, with a host of very different possible locations: natural places, the centre of Palma, the Serra de Tramuntana, Magalluf, the Cuevas de Drach”, explained the director. Monzon said that “the contrasts of the island were very conducive to the telling of a suffocating story, and because of this I wished that Majorca could be another character”. The leading actors, the partnership formed by Oscar winning actor Timothy Hutton and the actress Lucia Jimenez from Segovia, are engulfed by a labyrinth, a nightmare which makes them travel through an idyllic and beautiful Majorca in search of clues. An old depraved scientist, played by the legendery Irish actor David Kelly, helps to untangle the mystery. “I wanted a modern and contrasting couple, with a cold Timothy and a passionate Lucia Jimenez, very physical and very Mediterranean” explained Monzon.
For the actress, “the film was a complicated challenge, in a language which is not my maternal language, English, and for three months I had to live very intensively for the film”. Monzon persuaded the American actor through his casting director. “I was lucky that, because of the enthusiasm of the scriptwriter, he called me and I went to Paris that same afternoon to talk about the film and to have dinner with him”. The song Gloomy Sunday composed by the Hungarian Rezso Seress in 1933, is fundamental to the film “Kovak's box”. “The lyric is an outpouring of grief in which the writer says that he doesn't want to live any more after his love left him”, said Monzon. “The musician finished the song and jumped out of a window”, he added, “in the 30s and 40s dozens of people took their lives after listening to it, some radio stations banned it and its legend grew, being covered by stars such as Billie Holliday, who also committed suicide”. “Kovak's box”, Monzon's third film as director, and written in collaboration with Jorge Guerricaecheverria, won the public's award in the Festival of Lund (Sweden) last month. It is a joint production by Filmax and Tele5 and will be released in Spain in January.