THE HOLY BEAST
Our 4th film will be a co-production with Luc Besson's company in France, called Europa Corp. (www.europacorp.com). Erich Bruer who also wrote the screenplay will direct the film. The film will star John Malkovich and Natassha Kinski. We hope to start filming sometime in Jan or February in 2005.

SYNOPSIS: The Holy Beast is a Para psychological suspense film that tells the story of a man of God who makes a journey to a medieval hill-top town in Italy where he engages in a battle with the Antichrist.

The film is based on the true story of the Chilean Jesuit priest Manuel Lacunza who in 1767 was expelled, along with the entire Jesuit community, from Spanish colonial lands in South America by order of King Charles III of Spain. The priests were sent to Italy where they remained in exile for more than 30 years.

During his exile, Lacunza devoted himself to the study of the prophecies of the Bible. These interpretations were laid down in a book which set the Catholic Church alight. Lacunza was labelled a heretic and banished from the church by the Inquisition because of his definition of the true nature of the Antichrist. In our story, Lacunza is exiled from Chile to Italy.

Years pass when he receives word that finally, he has been granted permission to return home. But first he must meet a man named Julian Artiaga, a representative of the Real Audencia of Spain, who will give him papers authorising his return. The meeting is to take place in a remote village named Montesacro.

No-one seems to know where Montesacro is, but at an inn Lacunza meets a woman named Dorotea, who lives there. She takes him to the village whereupon he begins his search for Artiaga. But noone knows this man.

At the time of Lacunza's arrival the village has received another visitor, a tramp. This woman was apparently seen to have fallen to her death from a high bridge; but her body has disappeared and some hours later she is seen walking in the village. The villagers are afraid, and can reason only that she is a witch.

The village priest, Father Greco, can offer no answers and little solace to his community. Believing them all to be sinners he sees the witch to be some kind of test, a manifestation of the Devil, which must at all costs be cast out. So the villagers decide they must kill the witch.

Lacunza becomes caught up in an increasingly fearful atmosphere of superstition, guilt and paranoia before he realises that, since the woman is obviously not a witch, the villagers—egged on by the local priest—are about to commit murder. He struggles to understand the motives of the villagers, and to prevent them from killing.

Lacunza is trapped in the hill village by his search for passage home, by an increasingly intimate relationship with the woman Dorotea, and by his desperate efforts to persuade the community that it is not the old woman who is evil but the church, which commands her death. Gradually, his consciousness blurs between nightmare and reality, the present and the past, before we begin to realise that his journey is of an altogether more profound kind than we, or he, could possibly have known.