"The Bitter Chalice" wins RIFF Best Screenplay Award
A distinguished jury led by Paul Zonderland, senior vice
president and general manager of Walt Disney Studio Motion
Pictures Italy, recently voted The Bitter Chalice the "Best
Feature-Length Screenplay" at the Roma Independent Film
Festival (RIFF) in Italy. Co-written by Beverly Allen and
Jacques Lipkau Goyard, the work beat out 60 other
un-produced scripts from around the globe.
Described as an action-drama love story, The Bitter
Chalice is set against the Siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s.
Dramatic complications ensue when a Jewish-American woman
marries a Bosnian Muslim engineer in Upstate New York, only to
relocate to Sarajevo, where they are caught in the crossfire of
an ethnic cleansing campaign of the Bosnian War. "The girl's
American citizenship doesn't matter to the Serbian nationalist
militia men, who throw her in with Bosnian and Croatian
prisoners," says Allen, adding that the title comes from an old
Bosnian proverb, "Death is a bitter chalice from which we
all must drink." The chalice is a metaphor for the womb,
which is raped and rendered bitter.
The Syracuse University professor says that she wants this
story to remind people that mass rape was not only confined to
the Bosnian War; it has remained a problem in many parts of the
world.
The Bitter Chalice stems from a wartime love story,
Una donna, Una vita, which Goyard wrote in 1993 as a modern
retelling of Vittorio De Sica's Two Women, starring Sophia
Loren, and from Allen's Rape Warfare (University of
Minnesota Press, 1996), which contributed to two landmark
resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council.
From his production office in Rome (Italy), Goyard explains
that The Bitter Chalice is not a "Hollywood picture" in
the traditional sense. "The budget could range from $5 million,
if the project becomes an American made-for-TV film, to $20
million, if it evolves into an international release with a
reasonable cast and a good female director," he says.
Producer Christian von Tippelskirch, who recently
worked on Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, is
optimistic about the screenplay's future. "Rape has become a
part of warfare, and Beverly is fearless in confronting this
crime, especially in the way she weaves a global conflict into
a narrative dramatic structure," he says. "She makes a
difficult theme simultaneously provocative and humane."
Allen also wrote His Name Is Daniel, which was shot
in Sarajevo and was included in Bob Altman's made-for-TV
series, War Child (released internationally by Hallmark
Entertainment), and Lady Lush, a biopic about Marty
Mann, founding director of the National Council on Alcoholism,
which has been optioned twice in Hollywood and is being
considered for production by Tippelskirch and Indie filmmaker
Sharon Greytak.
Rob Enslin
Communications Manager
The College of Arts and Sciences
Syracuse University
309 Hall of Languages
Syracuse, NY 13244
315-443-3403
