CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS

(writer/director Richard Deakin, after Joseph Conrad)

copyright ACHILLES PRODUCTIONS LTD.

The story of a colonial adventure gone wrong - a dark tale for our times

“Mr.  Kurtz – he dead.”

The epigraph to TS Eliot’s modernist epoch-making poem, THE HOLLOW MEN, taken from HEART OF DARKNESS.

SYNOPSIS

“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”  

As  a small group of men on a nightbound yacht on the Thames wait for the tide to turn, they gaze upriver at the “brooding gloom” of London.  The ageing MARLOW recounts his youthful voyage up the Congo to meet Mr. Kurtz. The listening NARRATOR imagines the encounter, with its conclusion that civilisation itself is only a thin veneer that conceals “the horror… the horror…”  With reference to the current imperialist adventure in Iraq, the NARRATOR envisions a story of imperialism and savagery that cuts through the lie that is modern civilisation.  In a kaleidoscopic series of narratives within narratives, he vividly imagines the awful things MARLOW is telling him about, as dawn comes up on the Thames...

MARKETING ELEMENTS           

After the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the “War On Terror,” who would dare to suggest that imperialism has vanished from the Earth? But Joseph Conrad’s haunting tale is more than just a fable of colonialism: it has the power of myth in showing that a certain indefinable experience in the voyage upriver to meet the fateful “Mr. Kurtz” can cut the very ground from under our civilised feet.

GENRE  Drama

COMPARISONS   Apocalypse Now

WRITER-DIRECTOR  Richard Deakin

PRODUCER  ACHILLES PRODUCTIONS LTD.

                               

CAST  Approaching Jason Isaacs, Bill Nighy, Liam Cunningham

SCHEDULE  Shoot 2011 (2 weeks on boat, one on location)

BUDGET Low budget, to be confirmed