Chilean writer's novel adapted for stage

Critically acclaimed Chilean writer Hernan Rivera Letelier’s novel “The Movie Teller” has been adapted into a play by Teatro’s Cinema.

The multimedia drama is being staged at the Great Theater of China for three nights.

The story follows the rise and fall of a practitioner’s peculiar art of telling movies. It revolves around 12-year-old Maria Margarita, who re-enacts movies at a saltpeter mine town in northern Chile, in the Atacama Desert.

In the small working-class town, the cinema provides the only entertainment for miners to traverse worlds beyond their daily lives.

Maria’s family struggles to get by in life after her father suffered an injury while working in the mines. To watch a movie, her family has to scrimp and save for a single ticket. Maria watches a movie and then recreates it for her father and four brothers.

Word of her ability to re-enact movies begins to spread around town and she finds herself performing for a larger audience who prefer to watch her interpretations. But eventually, with the gradual abandonment of the mining town and the advent of television, she is left alone, stuck in the world of the past.

“The Movie Teller” is a play that will be suitable for all ages as it will explore how things in life are ultimately ephemeral.

Info

Date: September 27-29, 7:30pm
Tickets: 60-680 yuan
Venue: Great Theater of China
Address: 704 Niuzhuang Rd