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Guillermo Arriaga

NO MORE SCRIPTWRITERS IN MEXICO...

Guillermo Arriaga declares himself as cinema writer and will be in next July at the Flip – International Literature Festival in Parati, Rio de Janeiro.

Scriptwriter Guillermo Arriaga, known for his partnership with also Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu in the awarded Love’s a Bitch (highlight at the 24th São Paulo International Film Festival), 21 Grams and Babel (30th São Paulo IFF), celebrated with enthusiasm the decision, by the General Society of Writers in Mexico (SOGEM), of changing the billing for “scriptwriter” (guionista) to “cinema writer” (escritor de cine). And the word “script” (guión) changes to “cinema writing” (escritura de cine). He declared to the daily newspaper El Informador: “I hope this will dignify, starting from the semantics, the work of all writers, which is something I’ve been pursuing for a long time and will help more than one can imagine. The art of the writer starts to call more attention, and this shows we can conquer even more.”

Arriaga also underlined that this quest for dignity is not a threat, on the contrary. He considers, as a proof of it, the publishing of his literary works, especially the one that originated the film El Búfalo de la Noche (by Jorge Hernandez Aldana, with Diego Luna), whose 15 thousand books were sold out in two months, and the two-thousand re-edition finished in two hours. The book brought him the possibility of business and publicizing trips to New York, Buenos Aires, Bogota and Costa Rica. In July, between 04 and 08, he will be one of the guests at the V Flip – International Literature Festival in Parati, representing Mexican renovation besides writer Ignacio Padilla.

This specific work, Arriaga complemented, has already been translated into Portuguese, German, English, French, Czech, Dutch, Italian, Hebrew and Serbian, and is in the process of translation into other 14 languages. He affirmed that the most thrilling thing to a writer is to be translated, as each translator comes to him with a different semantic question, denoting the culture of each country. “This makes me happy, the interpretations all over the world”, he said. And before coming to Brazil, he delivered, among other recent works, the cinema text for Mas Allá, which will be directed by Lorenzo Vigas and produced by Arriaga himself. As Arriaga pointed out, his creative vein is far from extinguishing.

English version: Laura Rebessi