According to Screen Daily, French production outfit Coproduction Office and the Swedish Film Institute are backing Swedish director Hugo Lilja’s feature development of his acclaimed short THE UNLIVING, which won the Best European Short Film award at the 2011 Berlinale.
Check the short film’s synopsis:
Thirty years after an outbreak of zombies, people have gotten used to their presence. Zombies are a cheap source of labour and so enable the rest of society to have a high standard of living. Though first all the so-called normal people have to catch and tame the zombies; they then subject them to bloody experimental lobotomies. This is also the way Katrin and Mark get by. Yet their relationship threatens to fall apart when Mark brings somebody home.
Lilja will direct the feature himself and is currently writing the script. The short he directed was his Stockholm Film School graduation film. It’s currently also a nominee for the European Film Academy Short Film.
“The film is not your average zombie film,” explained Lilja to Screen Daily. “It explores how we choose to see others as inferior in order to take advantage of them. It has one foot in the art house but also has commercial potential. We want to focus on the story and its characters – who are not heroes. Rather they show us sides that most of us want to forget we also have. In this film people are pure egoists.”
Let’s with Hugo good luck in his ventures!
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