La Coalición Regional contra el Tráfico de Mujeres y Niñas en América Latina y el Caribe is filing charges against the government of Puebla State and writer Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) to prevent his book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, from being made into a movie.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgKP3RBl2bw
Teresa Ulloa, director of the Regional Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean, said a film to disseminate this book presents a risk of increasing tolerance and complicity by authorities in a country where pedophilia and trafficking of persons for sexual exploitation is growing. The claim is that this book and movie glorify and incite to, counter to Mexican law, illegal child prostitution.
Filming of the movie is to begin as a co-production of Puebla, Spain and Denmark of the 2004 Nobel Prize winning novel by García Márquez. On 18 September, the Secretary of Finance and Administration of the state of Puebla, Gerardo Perez Salazar, announced that the filming would begin in four weeks and that its production cost will be at least $8 million. He said that it is a co-production involving governments of Puebla, Spain and Denmark and the companies, Femsa and Televisa.
The film will be directed by the Dane, Henning Carlsen, with the screenplay by the Frenchman, Jean C. Carrière (The Tin Drum, The Unbearable Lightness of Being).
EXCERPT:
In my ninetieth year, I decided to give myself the gift of a night of love with a young virgin.
This was something new for me. I was ignorant of the arts of seduction and had always chosen my brides for a night at random, more for their price than their charms, and we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark, so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were … That night I discovered the improbable pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of modesty.
It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things.
We do not waste away with time; time is a tool that carves away our excess, like a chisel chips away marble to reveal a work of art.
I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn’t pay … by the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once … My public life, on the other hand, was lacking in interest: both parents dead, a bachelor without a future, a mediocre journalist … and a favorite of caricaturists because of my exemplary ugliness.
Each year, Internatioinal Book Day, April 23, is celebrated in much of the world by the public reading of a book. Puerto Vallarta is joined in this celebration with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Golden Bug,” a story of adventure and mystery.
