About the FILM:

With the assistance of the Rockefeller Media Arts Foundation (now the Tribeca Film Institute), Heather Henson and Handmade Puppet Dreams, and the Jane Henson Foundation, we completed a 17 minute sample of the film in 2007. The film has been playing nationally and internationally in the Handmade Puppet Dreams program, and nabbed a UNIMA-USA citation of excellence in 2009. We are currently working on financing the feature project. We are excited to utilize the burgeoning possibilities of new social media with this project, enlisting the book’s global fan base to create a collaborative platform to tell this unique story through social engagement opportunities. Which means that in addition to making the film (which will be made with collaborative elements from fans), we are striving to build and nurture communities around the pertinent themes of the book: literacy and literature, technology and progress, the love of beautiful ideas, and the like.

This dramatic narrative feature film adapted from the book will be made with a combination of rod-puppets, practical sets, image compositing, computer-generated effects, and classic cell animation. With a pastiche of techniques old and new, the approach aims to pay homage to textural histories while utilizing the newest technologies available.

Because of the film’s broad stylistic approach, Too Loud A Solitude is not bound by the rigid definitions of any particular genre, so will appeal to audiences who love animation, sci-fi, drama, and horror . We believe that this is a powerful recipe for an exciting new vision in cinema.

About the BOOK:

The 1940s and 1950s in Czechoslovakia were a horrific time.  The Russian army and KGB (secret police) had ‘liberated’ the country following WWII and the Czech people were forced to witness the cruel takeover of their unique culture.  Czech citizens were arrested, interrogated, sent to forced labor camps and uranium mines – some executed following ‘anti-Semitic show trials’ initiated by Stalin and his regime. Hrabal wrote Too Loud A Solitude as an unsentimental account of what happened to him during those times, focusing on the life of the lead character, Hanta (surely a hybrid of himself and the Eastern European everyman).  Hrabal, a lawyer and beloved novelist, wrote about characters and experiences usually passed over by others.  The magic of his lyrical and tragicomic writing came from the courage to remain open to what he called “the Flood of Sparkling Experience”, an openness to seeing life in it’s fullest capacity and a commitment to giving even the most common of characters the right to a poetic portrayal.

Many of Hrabal’s own books were banned, and many great books were physically destroyed, an act Hrabal characterizes in Too Loud A Solitude as “crimes against humanity.”  It was his commitment to fearlessly chronicling the difficult and painful history of his country that makes him one of the world’s greatest writers.