Gustavo Hernandez’s Persomnia Will Deprive You of Sleep
John Squires
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You know you’re talented when your debut feature gets a remake within a year of its release, and Gustavo Hernandez is one of the few who fit that bill. He burst onto the scene with La Casa Muda in 2010, remade as Silent House in 2011, and up next he makes his English-language debut.
Variety reports out of Ventana Sur that Hernandez is lining up psychological paranormal thriller Persomnia as his third directorial outing. The film is set up at Montevideo’s Mother Superior Films, where Hernandez partners with Ignacio Cucucovich, who will produce.
Written by Juma Fodde Roma, Persomnia centers on a young actress who joins a radical theater troupe experimenting with sleep deprivation in order to perform a play first created and put on in a psychiatric ward 30 years ago – and whose original performers, all inmates, died in a terrible fire.
As the days pass, the actors reach new levels of sensitivity, opening up to the spirits in the hospital in order to achieve unique performances, as these spirits drive the play towards the same terrible ending.
“There have been experiments on insomnia, what happens to people after four, five, six days without sleep. It’s as if their sensibility, perceptions open up to another world,” said Hernandez, adding that Persomnia is a horror film which “also talks about madness in art and just how far artists will go to create something which transcends.”
Hernandez and Cucucovich aim to co-produce with Sebastian Aloi’s Buenos Aires/L.A.-based Aeroplano Films.
What are some of the negative effects of sleep deprivation? Find out below!
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