Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Last News

Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 novel “The Pledge” has proven to be especially durable to adaptations over the years. More well-known of these is Sean Penn’s 2000 film “The Pledge,” a grisly Jack Nicholson starrer that, if anything, is perhaps remembered of the promise that Penn held as director in the early aughts before tumbling down the rabbit hole of political melodrama.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Arbelos, a Los Angeles-based boutique film distribution company, has acquired North American rights to the new 4K restoration of Béla Tarr collaborator György Fehér’s landmark but long unseen Hungarian masterpiece “Twilight” (“Szürkület”). The restored version of the film world premiered in the Berlinale’s Classics strand on Monday. Hungary’s National Film Institute handled the sale. Fehér, who made only two theatrical features, shot the black-and-white film at the end of the 1980s. Based on the crime novella “The Pledge” by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, it is the story of a retired detective who uses a girl as bait to try to catch a serial killer.