Kadare's Novel to Become Film ?

I always enjoy posting the interesting, unusual, and informative tidbits that I pick up from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) such as the one below describing a novel by Albanian author Ismail Kadare that will be made into a film.

To know more about BIRN, I suggest that you visit BalkanInsight.com

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Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams to Become Film

Tirana | 01 April 2010 |

Iranian born and New York-based acclaimed artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat told IndieWire in a recent interview that she is working to transform the novel of Albanian writer Ismail Kadare into a movie.

“I have been very interested by another novel written by Albanian author Ismail Kadare, called “The Palace of Dreams”; this film will be made in English, and it will be most likely filmed in Eastern Europe,” Neshat said.

According to Neshat, the novel can serve as an allegory related to Iran in the way in which it could capture the way the ‘ruling party,’ the ‘state’ tries to control people’s imagination, even their dreams.

“I sense there are ways to explore the absurdity, the vicious fantasticism that threatens us today,” Neshat said, adding that: “With “The Palace of Dreams” I see a beautiful parallel in Albanian’s dark history and struggle with communism and the Iranian plight with the Islamic revolution.”

First published in 1981 in Albania, where it was banned, "The Palace of Dreams" unfolds as a parable about an all-controlling dictatorship that monitors even the subconscious lives of its citizens.

Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in the southern town of Gjirokastra, near the Greek border. He first studied at the University of Tirana in Albania, and later at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.

During half a century of Stalinist rule in Albania his works attacked totalitarianism and the doctrines of socialist realism with subtle allegories.

A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, his novels and essays have been translated into more than 40 languages and have been awarded with the Booker International Prize for literature and the Prince of Asturias Prize, among others.