Euthanasia film a smash hit

2004-09-04 22:28

Venice, Italy - A true story of one man's fight for the legal right to die, by Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar, has proved the talking point of the Venice International Film Festival so far.

Amenabar's film "Mar Adentro" (Out to Sea) pulls no punches in telling the story of quadraplegic Ramon Sampedro but yet manages the trick of being an uplifting film about illness and death.

The young director and his cast received an extended ovation when they arrived for a press conference in Venice after a critics' screening early on Saturday which established the film as clear favourite for the festival's prestigious Golden Lion prize.

"There is no prize, no statue, that can live up to this," said actor Javier Bardem after waiting out the applause. Bardem plays Sampedro, who spent 30 bed-bound years wishing to bring his life to a dignified end, despite the well-meaning efforts of those who loved him.

After losing a long battle in the Spanish court system for the legal right to assisted suicide, he eventually committed suicide after the publication of his book "Letters from Hell" in 1996.

Amenabar denies the film advocates euthanasia, although it is bound to revive debate in Spain, where it goes on release this weekend.

"Ramon Sampedro would be extremely happy about all this talk about euthanasia. My film was made not so much to fight for euthanasia but to discuss it," said the Chilean-born director of "Vanilla Sky" starring Tom Cruise, "Tesis" and "Abre los Ojos".

"He always talked about the freedom to choose. We wanted to talk about the issue in a general way."

Bardem, in real life a robust and muscular actor who received an Oscar nomination for Julian Schnabel's "Before Night Falls" in 1999, manages a stunning portrayal of Sampedro's wasted body.

After his role in such a strangely uplifting film, he says he sees death "as not necessarily traumatic but something that is added on to the process of life".

"Ramon Sampedro was a hero. The film is not taking a position about anything. It is really a defence of the freedom of each of us because life is a right, not a must, not an obligation. And the film is full of characters who are positive about life," he explained.

Even so, the film is an emotional roller coaster for audiences and leaves not a dry eye by the time it reaches its inevitable ending.

It gets its title "Mar Adentro" from a poem by Sampedro, who wrote using his mouth to write.

To show the character's inner life and thoughts, Amenabar has his body take imaginary flight over the coastline of his beloved Galicia in northwestern Spain, down to the sea which has always been the main attraction of his life and where he had the swimming accident with paralysed him when still only 25.

"We did not want the film to be corseted or paralysed and the challenge was that of creating a dynamic film with a character that can't move. So these flying scenes, scenes of going to the sea, etcetera, were very important in the film," said the director.

- AFP