Last Summer at Bluefish Cove filming in Venezuela
Fina Torres, the Venezuelan director of such marvelous gems as Oriana, Habana Eva, is currently filming a feature length adaptation of Jane Chamber's ground breaking play Last Summer at Bluefish Cove.
The film will be in Spanish, with a contemporary Venezuelan setting. You can hear the director herself talking the film here.
Fina Torres was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1951. She studied in journalism in Venezuela, then moved to Paris to study cinematography at the Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques. Her debut film, Oriana, won the Camera d'Or at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. Since then she co-wrote, produced and directed her second feature, a comedy, Celestial Clockwork, in 1993, winner of four international priczs. Then she directed for Fox Searchlight romantic comedy Woman on Top, starring Penelope Cruz, nominated for Best Director at the 2001 Alma Awards. In 2009 she directed Habana Eva, a romantic comedy set in Cuba. In 2011 she wrote the screenplay for From Prada to Nada, a Latina spin on Sense and Sensibility, set in East Los Angeles.
You can see the trailer and find out more about Habana Eva here. At minute 4:00 of the interview Torres talks about adapting Last Summer at Bluefish Cove.
Jane Chambers wrote Last Summer at Bluefish Cove for The Glines, a New York company that focused on plays representing gay and lesbian experience in 1980. The play was first performed at the Glines' First Gay American Arts Festival. The play centers on a character who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and the impact this has on her and her lesbian friends who vacation together every summer. Chambers wrote Bluefish Cove after one of her own friends had died from cancer; it was to take on a very ironic tone, however, when Chambers herself was diagnosed with the disease in 1981. Chambers continued to write for the Glines until her death on February 15, 1983, in her Greenport, Long Island, home.
We staged a scene from Last Summer at Bluefish Cove at the very beach in Long Island, NY, that inspired Jane Chambers to write the play. You can see the scene here:
