With his revolutionary writing style and a directorial signature full of stylistic inventions and surreal visual touches, Charlie Kaufman quickly established himself as one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers. After a long apprenticeship at various American television networks, where he wrote numerous episodes of series, Kaufman managed to pitch the screenplay of Being John Malkovich to Spike Jonze, who brought it to the screen in 1999. The director’s visual genius found fertile ground in Kaufman’s equally brilliant storytelling. The collaboration between Kaufman as screenwriter/producer and Jonze and Gondry as directors proved to be an inexhaustible source of creativity, giving rise to gems such as Adaptation (2002), in which Nicolas Cage plays both a struggling Kaufman and his imaginary twin Donald, a commercially minded alter ego, and the dreamlike Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which earned him the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Kaufman made his directorial debut in 2008 with the incredible Synecdoche, New York, a film about the impossibility of controlling one’s artistic creation, where the part expands to encompass the whole and the passage of time devours everything. In 2015, he won the Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize at Venice with the stop-motion animated film Anomalisa, created through crowdfunding, which allowed him to preserve his artistic freedom. The beautiful and poetic I’m Thinking of Ending Things, based on the novel by Iain Reid, is instead a dreamlike journey that folds in on itself, full of regrets and missed opportunities, crafted to deceive the viewer until the very end.
A visual and sonic poem following the streets of Athens with the ghosts of two recently deceased young people: he, a queer Lebanese translator; she, a half-Irish photographer. They wander the city together, finding solace in the challenging beauty of life and its consequences,...
A hallucinatory and surreal journey inside John Malkovich’s mind.
A schizophrenic, autobiographical filmic portrait of Kaufman himself.
A machine that – perhaps – erases a past love from the mind.
The impossible representation of reality on a stage without boundaries.
A simple man and his obsessions, leading him to an identity crisis.
A journey into the mind of a man disillusioned with life.
