Rodrigo Cortés is preparing for some love and music…
The 48-year-old Spanish film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and writer will helm Love Gets a Room, a Warsaw Ghetto-set romantic musical drama.
The film will star Clara Rugaard and Ferdia Walsh-Peelo.
Shot under the radar in order to magnify impact nearer to release when theaters return, said its producer Adrián Guerra, Love Gets a Room is produced and financed by Guerra’s Nostromo Pictures, with Lionsgate International handling international rights and CAA representing U.S. rights.
Top Spanish independent A Contracorriente Films will release the film in Spain theatrically at the end of the year.
Written by German bestseller writer David Safier and Cortés, the film captures a group of actors as they perform in the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto, in a life or death context on a run-down stage, Love Gets a Room, a real-life musical comedy that was written by playwright Jerzy Jurandot, a Polish Jew, and performed by a group of actors in the winter of 1942 at the Femina Theater in Warsaw.
“Safier discovered the existence of the original work and wanted to honor that beautiful achievement made by a group of actors now forgotten in the middle of the blackness,” Guerra told Variety.
The text of the play that is represented in the film is the original, as it was performed in 1942. The lyrics of the songs have survived, with the music for the film being composed in the tradition of the musical theater of that time. All the songs have been shot live and the sound of the original takes has been used, without playback.
Told in real time —as Cortés’ acclaimed Buried – Love Gets a Room “engulfs the audience in an emotional adventure to discover a side of history never before told on film,” Guerra said.
This pictures “all kinds of artists (actors, musicians, writers) still performing, under the most unlikable circumstances, only to save their sanity, to stoke the art they deeply love, to engage in a civilizing, humanity-affirming exchange,” he added.
Love Gets a Room captures Cortés on a roll, after the publication of his second novel, The Extraordinary Years, written in the great Spanish tradition of the absurd which became one of the unexpected literary hits this summer in Spain.