Ventana Sur Animation! Feature ‘The Factory Beyond the Hill’ Brings Brazilian Literary Giant J.J. Veiga to the Big Screen for the First Time (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Anna Marie de la Fuente Among the buzziest titles at Ventana Sur’s Animation!, Lucas Abrahão & Ricardo Kump’s “The Factory Beyond the Hill” brings multi-awarded Brazilian author J.J.

Veiga to the big screen for the first time. “J. J. Veiga is a uniquely visual and evocative author, and it’s still a mystery to me why his work has never been adapted for the screen.

His portrayal of Brazil’s rural heartlands is unmatched, and we’re committed to doing justice to his vision,” said Abrahão who added that some of Veiga’s short stories may have been adapted for television but never in cinema. “His style is very atmospheric, bordering on horror, and the settings are very under-depicted in our cinema.

These are areas of central Brazil that are far away from the most picturesque scenarios and from our urban centers, really kind of ‘middle of nowhere.’ Since he wrote most of his stuff during the military dictatorship, there’s a lot of allegory regarding authoritarianism in them, too,” Abrahão told Variety. “While Veiga didn’t like to be branded as a “magical realist” author, it’s pretty easy to see the connection between his work and that of writers like Julio Cortazar and even Gabriel García Marquez,” Abrahão continued, who thinks it’s the Kafkaesque tone in Veiga’s writing that set him apart. “He wrote very clearly about very strange things.