By 1350 BC the Pharaoh Ajenatón broke with the inheritance received, applied an extensive pruning to the Egyptian pantheon and moved the capital of the empire to Ajetatón, a new city established halfway to Thebes and Memphis and dedicated to the worship of a single deity, Aton His was an adventure as fleeting as then misunderstood.
The first monotheistic monarch in history - Nefertiti's husband and father of Tutankhamen - now stars in a unique adventure, only available to the most utopian: the first feature film shot entirely in ancient Egyptian of the annals of the cinema. A film shot by a Spanish team in Alcalá de Henares that finalizes its postproduction while awaiting its disturbing encounter with the public light. «It's a special movie. Despite dealing with a period issue, it has nothing to do with Ridley Scott's tapes or American cinema approaches to use, ”says Ignacio Oliva Chronicle , the screenwriter and director of Heretic, a feature that some Egyptologists have qualified already of "Egyptological artifact" worthy of study.
The film portrays the last three years of the reign of Ajenatón, the pharaoh who broke all the schemes and fed the wrath of the clergy. The scenes revive the external threats and the palace intrigues that marked the end of his dream, whose remains, despite the conscientious campaign to eradicate his memory, have survived at the Tell el Amarna site. "The last years were the most critical time: the empire suffered a period of major crisis related to the monotheistic conception and the religious schism," argues Oliva.
Structured as of those three years, Hereje offers an adjustment of accounts with the biography of Ajenatón and the own history of the celluloid and its string of lucrative films about pharaonic hunters, mummies and consorts paid to the same beauty canon. "One of the reasons why I made this movie is because I wanted to see Queen Nefertiti speaking to a general without being a stereotype of beauty but as a political leader of her time, which is really what happened," explains the warp of adventure. "If Nefertiti were seen so represented, I do not think she looked bad at all because she was not a consort outside the political issues but a queen who made great decisions in both internal and external empire," he mutters.
In her reliable search for a civilization that arouses fascination in abundance, Oliva found no choice but to embrace the unknown. «I wanted to contribute something. It didn't make much sense to make a film about Ajenatón in which the monarch and the rest of the court spoke in Spanish. I never considered it as a possibility, ”he slides. «I thought that the Egyptian language was a fundamental bridge to practice a dive of the spectator in the Amarna years and it also seemed to me something that had never been done».
The main challenge of the experiment was to resurrect a dead language from which, beyond the hieroglyphs of papyri and stelae, we have not received any sound proof. «It's a hypothetical proposal because we don't know how it sounded. I understand that producers will find it very difficult to understand. For me, it was the only sense of making this movie ».
A "little madness" that has had the scientific advice of José Ramón Pérez Accino , professor of Egyptology at the Complutense University of Madrid and director of a dozen Spanish archaeological missions that pierce the sands of Egypt. «Another difficulty was that the ancient Egyptian is a consonant language. Of course, they would use vowels to be able to pronounce it but they didn't write it down. We decided that it didn't make much sense to make a literal translation of the script because Egyptian and contemporary thoughts are different. Instead, we found a text that phonetically sounded like the classical Egyptian spoken then. We build it on concept words such as' soldier ',' country of the two lands', 'Thebes',' gold ',' father '... and complete it with a series of phonetic words,' recalls Oliva. The characters also chamullan other two languages equally dead, Hittite and Akkadian, used by the neighboring towns that made peace and war with the pharaohs.
The cast of actors - headed by Pedro Casablanc , in the role of Nefertiti's father; Diana Bernedo as Nefertiti and Raúl Prieto incarnating Ajenatón-battalion to get the text. «The most curious thing was the text. It was necessary to elaborate a speech of a duration similar to what our language is with a rhythm so that it made sense, at the level of emotions, intensities and replication ”, acknowledges Bernedo.
«The shooting was very funny because there were times when one missed the text and forgot something. You had to improvise in a language we didn't even know » . In their help, the team turned to blackboards with the dialogues. «Learning a text with such long sequences is practically impossible. It was hellish. We rely on texts written on blackboard for a reference to exist, ”admits the director.
ONLY 900,000 EUROS
With a modest budget -not exceeding 900,000 euros-, the film has sharpened the ingenuity. Part of the costumes comes from the one used in Exodus, Ridley Scott's film that tells the slavery of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt and the liberation warned by Moses, whose exteriors were shot on horseback from Almeria and Fuerteventura. Postproduction has rebuilt the landscapes, temples and palatial rooms of ancient Egypt with a contingency-proof will despite economic tightness. «I didn't expect postproduction to be such an interesting stage. We have seen dozens of documentaries and movies. We have commented skies, stone textures, colors of the decoration of the temples and thousands of details in the digital elevations ”, evokes Oliva. "We had to make the most of our budgetary possibilities, but I still think it has been very good and that we have done it with great rigor."
With a conventional footage (90 minutes), Heretic continues to set on low heat, as it has been until now all its elaboration. "The film continues its course, more slowly than I would like, but we have already started with the sound and we are finishing the image part", details its impeller, who is confident of completing the song later this year. The pharaonic challenge will then be to seduce distributors and prepare a premiere at the height of a "rare avis" of Spanish independent cinema. «It is made to be seen in a room but it will be a matter of the distribution coming to the call. It is a strange film that Egyptologists will watch closely and that the general public should see without the classical cinema schemes. In any case, it will not leave anyone indifferent ».
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