Natalia Borodin, screenwriter

Born in Czechoslovakia (in Bratislava, now Slovak Republic) | Dual French and American citizenship | Studied screenwriting and dramaturgy under Milan Kundera at the Prague Academy of Arts Film School (FAMU) and continued at the Sorbonne University in Paris 1 where she graduated with distinction with her doctoral thesis "Is Screen Adaptation of Proust's In Search of Lost Time Possible?" | She was assistant to filmmakers Robbe-Grillet, Grigori Kozincev and René Laloux, and later worked as screenwriter for filmmakers Juraj Jakubisko, Dusan Hanak, Jaromil Jires, Jean-Jacques Andrien, Walerian Borowczyk and Pierre Beuchot. | She has written scripts for documentaries (e.g. about Martina Navratilova, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, and Susan Landale), television adaptations (Balzac, Stendhal, Mario Bendetti, Henry James, Italo Svevo and more) and features, e.g. TICHA RADOST / QUIET JOY (theme and first version), directed by Dusan Hanak, CORTO MALTESE, LA COUR SECRETE DES ARCANES, an animated feature adaptation of a comic book by Hugo Pratt, directed by Pascal Morelli, and PATRIA MIA (awarded the BEAUMARCHAIS prize).

The story of PATRIA MIA (with the title suggesting both tragedy and irony) takes place during 1936-1940, in Czechoslovakia, France and Portugal. It is inspired by Jiri Mucha's autobiographic novel PODIVNE LASKY (Strange Loves). The screenplay's main characters are : Czech composer and conductor Vitezslava Kapralova (1915-1940), Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) and Czech writer Jiri Mucha (1915-1991), the son of the world famous Art Nouveau painter Alfons Mucha.

The screenplay is centered on Kapralova, whose brief life reminds of the short-lived flight of a meteorite - the meteorite that is sometimes referred to by astronomers as "a planet that has never existed." The story is conceived as an epic and should be neither a fresque from the period of 1936-40 nor a war feature but an intimate portrayal of individual lives on the background of a tragic epoch. Despite the tragedy of both the human lives and the historical period, this is rather a bittersweet comedy.

Sound in this film is particularly important: both Kapralova and Martinu are composers and as such they perceive sound more intensely, compared to "non-musicians".

While archival footage is part of several sequences, at times the screenplay chooses to reflect the historical events of the period through personal scenes or "incidents" that can express the period atmosphere in a more intense and thus more effective way (e.g. uncertainty, anticipation, fear, carelessness, brutality). This approach is applied few times also to external events, such as German occupation of Paris or the beginning of the war.

The screenplay was to be realized by Czech filmmaker Jaromil Jires, (who directed, among other, Kundera's JOKE, LABYRINTH with Maximilian Schell, and documentary films about Sydney Lumet and actor Abraham Muray), with the camera by Miroslav Ondricek (who is known from the many films of Milos Forman and his collaboration with Lindsay Anderson, Mike Nichols and George Roy Hill). Dominique Janne from Belgium, who co-produced e.g. the film FARINELLI, and Edgar Reitz from Germany, film director and co-producer of film epics HEIMAT and ZWEITE HEIMAT, wanted to participate in the project as minority producers. After the tragic death of Jaromil Jires, screenwriter Natalia Borodin could finalize the script and have it translated into English thanks to a commission and stipend awarded to her by the BEAUMARCHAIS Foundation.

Jiri Mucha (son of writer Jiri Mucha and grandson of Alfons Mucha) and his wife Sarah, who administer the Alfons Mucha Foundation, and the widow of Jiri Mucha, composer Geraldine Thomsen-Mucha, have been delighted by the script and would like to see the project realized.