Maleficarum The Movie

[La Reine Margot]

I had an spectacular idea, to have new topics, one for each of our productions. So, without further due, I begin with MALEFICARUM! Our NUMBER ONE BEST SELLER OF ALL TIME! (Do I sound like Trump?)

Kidding.

I was thinking of doing this, anyway, like Pedro has in the Producer's corner, one title per thread, kind of.

I was pressed, or inspired by a comment in one of my posts which I responded thus:

Margot,
I'd been discussing Maleficarum (via PM) with a member here...who turned out to not be familiar with this EXCELLENT film featuring Amy being BURNED AT THE STAKE!!!

So I went to the "Red Feline Pictures", expecting to find a visual flyer for "Maleficarum"...and was SHOCKED to find NOTHING!!!

...I mean, after all, the picture in the background of the "Red Feline Pictures" topic is AMY burning at the stake in Maleficarum!

What's going on here?

....

Thank you for your appreciation of our great film Maleficarum.

Our sites are constantly growing with posts of new productions and I guess older films are often ignored; however, Maleficarum is our best seller of ALL TIME, and I personally felt that maybe it didn't need a lot of help to go places.

Your comment made me think and I went back to our sites to look for it and, alas! I had the same problem as you did!

As it happens I'm in the middle of re building our vermeerworks site. We had an issue with our system. I'll be posting a lot about all the films and particularly Maleficarum.

I'm working on our redfeline.com and pachamamafilms.com as well. It will be easier to find our films in all our sites. Lots of work! But thank you again!

vermeerworks.com is under construction right now, so if you go visit now it will seem a bit odd, but in a few days it will be fully active. The links to the stores are working fine. It's just the site, that it is in its early stages.

If you read below, you'll know what I mean:



Maleficarum - The Movie

In October of 2010 we began a new adventure in film: Maleficarum.

Sirwiñakuy was still showing at the Cinemateca when Jac Avila began casting for his new film.

The director of the highly acclaimed Krik? Krak! Tales of a Nightmare and the celebrated mini series El Hombre de la Luna, wanted to focus on the little known history of the Holy Inquisition in the Andes.

Read more here: http://vermeerworks.com/home/2020/04/30 ... /#more-129

[La Reine Margot]

As I build the vermeerworks site, I go back in time to tons of materials on the movies, like this article written by none other than our cruel Inquisitor. I just published it in our vermeerworks site:

How was Maleficarum made as told by Beto Lopez L. The Inquisitor.



I must confess that I was on the set of Jac Avila's film, Maleficarum, a story that take us to the times of the inquisition by the hand of a director who doesn't hesitate to put to the test everything that surrounds him; like a doctor that, scalpel in hand, prepares to neatly dissect a body. It's not clear to me if it is to cure or to cut, but whatever his intention is, he will do it with professionalism and in an almost aseptic way.



That's where the two leading ladies, Amy Hesketh and Mila Joya, come in. Mila accepted to be in this movie, almost without really knowing what was waiting for her, while Amy, being a producer, knew exactly what was in store, more than that, she had a hand in shaping what was to come. While one, Mila, hardly knew how Avila was going to shape her acting to unsuspected levels (the other, Amy, knew very well) achieving something that few directors do, make the pain of torture and the crudity of the scenes transcend the plot to install themselves in the set, where everything is silence but the feeling of surprise can be seen in the eyes of his collaborators, in the disguised expressions of the gaffers and the whispers of the cast that try to say: we're accomplices of this savagery.



Read More: http://vermeerworks.com/home/2020/05/01 ... suffering/

[La Reine Margot]

Maleficarum: A Transformation for All.

As told by our inquisitor, Beto Lopez



A poet once wrote, “as the calendar vacates the premises…” In this case, we were vacating 2010, when - almost out of nowhere - we had this event that, in time, would become the film Maleficarum.

It started for all of us with a series of talks given by the director Jac Avila to the cast and crew, to the end of introducing them to the world they would be inhabiting over the coming weeks.

It was on a distant Saturday afternoon, that we had the wardrobe fittings, and that’s really when we all experienced a metamorphosis into our characters. At Jac’s home studio, we all had a kind of floor show - competing for the most striking costume.

Continue reading:

http://vermeerworks.com/home/2020/05/04 ... n-for-all/

[La Reine Margot]

Maleficarum Review: "one of the most singularly memorable films ever made"

REVIEWED BY CHARLES LONBERGER
(Published on February 2, 2014 in The Beverly Hills Outlook

With the release in 2011 of this landmark film, Pachamama Films made an indelible mark on World Cinema and simultaneously took hold of the popular imagination. Produced in Bolivia, it is a direct descendant of 1970′s Mark of the Devil, though it is light years better, being constructed with care, self-awareness and intelligence.



The production, by Amy Hesketh and Jac Avila, is tasteful, yet filled with panache – dramatic, rich and theatrical. As both costumer and make up artist, Hesketh establishes the color design of the production in the black attire of the clergy (suggestive of their dark hearts) and through the red blood on flagellated flesh, an appropriate color scheme, considering the Occult accusations that fly in its screenplay.



The combination of a screenplay and its realization, both saying different things, here does not contradict, but culminates in an entertaining and enjoyable viewing experience.

The screenplay, by Jac Avila, is an accusatory criticism of the Catholic Church in the age of the Inquisition. On more than one occasion, he references the Church’s anti-Semitism (something he had earlier mentioned in 2005′s Martyr) employing a narration from the perspective of a youthful witness who observes false accusations based, in part and in flashback, on the belief that sapphic activities are sinful, with trumped up charges leveled as a means to acquire personal wealth, even requiring the intended victim of said charges to fund their own persecution. By making this youthful perspective the audience’s perspective, it is implied that future generations will turn from such injustice.



It is interesting to observe that scriptwriter Avila aligns the false accusations with the Indigenous populace, something that would have implications in Bolivia’s diverse population makeup as would, given the country’s recent political changes, the depiction of collective theft directed against an individual, wealthy inheritor. In a similar vein, the “force of prayer” is depicted as an act of public aggression produced by a mob mentality. The implications in all of this would not be lost on a contemporary Bolivian audience.



Yet, Avila gives his fiction a happy ending of sorts in having his heroines miraculously resurrected and extracting revenge. His final pan to the heavens suggests that there just may be a deity looking out for us, after all.



But what Avila the scriptwriter condemns, Avila the director celebrates, at least as far as the Inquisition activities themselves go. For, while he does depict the victims touchingly holding hands despite their shackles, he converts a Chamber of Torments into a stage for public entertainment, mythologizing the kiss of the whip by imbuing extended scenes of flamboyant torture with a religious ambiance. One set of shackles is replaced by another, and embers burn, legs akimbo in chains. In truth, the criticism of religious persecution merely provides a context for extended scenes of torture in a fictionalized context to be enjoyed for their own sake.



Continue reading:
http://vermeerworks.com/home/2020/05/24 ... ever-made/

[La Reine Margot]

As I go on re building our VermeerWorks site, I have the pleasure of visiting the past.
My most recent post deals with our best seller of all time, Maleficarum, and more specifically with an interview Jac had with Mike Haberfelner at (re)Search My Trash, published in July of 2012

An Interview with Jac Avila on the Maleficarum-Censorship-Debate



Maleficarum has recently become the centerpiece of a censorship controversy. How did this start actually?

It started with a letter. We released the film in October 2011, on the 31st to coincide with Halloween. It was our intention to have a premiere at the Cinemateca, a place that was open to our movies in the recent past, but we couldn’t get that date. Between October and February of this year we held discussions, conversations, negotiations to finally have a theatrical release date there. We finally agreed to have it sometime in March or April and gave them the film for evaluation; I was assuming that they wanted to see if the film held technically, and to rate it. The people at the Cinemateca held a preview screening of Martyr before its formal release, but they didn’t do that with our other films: Sirwiñakuy and Nocturnia. All three films were shown, Nocturnia and Martyr were not very successful while Sirwiñakuy ran for 5 months.



I was waiting for a letter with a date for the screening. Instead I got a letter saying that the “commission of evaluation” decided not to show the film because of its “explicit language” which I read as censorship. Martyr and Sirwiñakuy were just as explicit and were shown. LA Zombie, banned in Australia because of its extreme explicit content, was shown at the Cinemateca.

So, why was Maleficarum censored? I wrote an open letter to the director of the Cinemateca, a newspaper picked it up and all hell broke loose. Not long after the letter one of our people had a chance encounter with the programmer at one of the multiplexes here. She told him about  Maleficarum and he said simply “we’ll show it, bring it.”

When she told me the great news I asked Beto to contact the other multiplex to offer them the film as well and they also agreed to show it. Suddenly, the “forbidden film” was opening nationally and in big commercial houses.

We submitted the film to the people who do the rating of films here and they came up with R (18 years and older). So, the arguments that the Cinemateca had were deflated with this new development. The papers picked it up too. The issue was no longer the film, but censorship.



Read the complete interview HERE
http://vermeerworks.com/home/2020/06/02 ... ip-debate/

[lionrobe]

Hi, am-I in the right section/topic ? Did I miss something ?
I have an interest for Maleficarum monxa mala, I checked carefully all I could, and I don't know if I'll buy too the 2nd opus.
Have you please some photos, some details, more to post ?

With kind regards

[La Reine Margot]

Hi, am-I in the right section/topic ? Did I miss something ?
I have an interest for Maleficarum monxa mala, I checked carefully all I could, and I don't know if I'll buy too the 2nd opus.
Have you please some photos, some details, more to post ?

With kind regards

You can visit our site Red Feline Pictures where there are pages and pages about the film in older posts:

http://redfeline.com/page/4/

I guess I'll be posting about it.

[lionrobe]

THX for informations.
Why not...
An other question, the branding of Amy was a breahless moment in the first opus. It's probably a very expensive special effect, that's probably why you don't use it regularly?

[La Reine Margot]

THX for informations.
Why not...
An other question, the branding of Amy was a breahless moment in the first opus. It's probably a very expensive special effect, that's probably why you don't use it regularly?

Special FX are complicated, in the case of Maleficarum, it took time to deal with each of the branding with hot iron effects. Both Amy and Mila were subjected to that.

In Maleficarum Jac had a large crew to help with that, including a couple of the actors who also participated in the effects, like Beto, the inquisitor in the movie, but who was in charge of that great smoke that rises as the hot iron touches the skin, and not to mention the lights, that were set in the proper way for the camera to capture the event the right way.

The effect was used in Monxa Mala, but without the help of a crew. Because of budget constrains, Jac was doing all the crew work, as well as acting, and was also working out the FX during the branding of Simonne.

That kind of effects can be time consuming, which affects the budget, time is money, after all. Having said that, I believe there will be more branding in future movies.

[lionrobe]

Thx again for quick answer.
I understand perfectly the budget constrains. If you gain only a fistful of fans of branding scenes, the result is negative.
But...can you tell us if Maleficarum is the most bought movie of your production ?

I stop posting, try to buy Monxa mala this day or tomorrow.