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TAPROBANA
Cast & Crew
- Director
- Producer
- Screenwriter
- Director of photography
- Main Cast
- Editor (Cut)
- Sound
- Production Design
Director's comment
Camões was the first European poet to have an extended experience in Africa, India and Indochina. He wrote Os Lusíadas while he was exiled in the Indes, a poem that glorifies the Portuguese navigators that departed from Lusitanian shores and traveled to Taprobana, now known as Sri Lanka.Many myths surround Camões’ voyages, and one in particular was an inspiration for this film. It has Camões falling in love with a Chinese courtesan, which he then baptized with a Greek nymph’s name: Dinamene. The myth goes on to have Camões and Dinamene imprisoned on a boat to Goa and suffering a shipwreck. Supposedly his lover drowned, as Camões was too busy swimming after his manuscript.
Taprobana is intended as a poetic and absurd satire about this contradictory and charming character; a European exiled in the Indes, but obsessed with his homeland; an iconoclast rapscallion that wrote some of the most sublime verses of the Portuguese language, where spiritual illumination is inextricable from sexual apotheosis.
