Viktor Frankl's revolutionary Holocaust memoir entitled "Man's Search for Meaning" is officially set to be adapted in the silver screen. Ben Silverman and "Hands of Stone" producer Jay Weisleder's feature partnership, Fuego films, have collaborated with the Emmy award-winning journalist, Giselle Fernandez, to secure the book. Adam Gibgot was also chosen to pen the script of the forthcoming movie.
According to the Huffington Post, Viktor Frankl was a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, Italy when he and his wife were arrested and transported by the Nazis to the concentration camps in September 1942.
During his stay in the isolated camp, he made use of his therapeutic skills to inspire other captives to fight for their lives through finding meaning in their ill-fated suffering. Though most of her family including his pregnant wife did not make it, he, prisoner number 119104 was able to survive. As per Deadline's report, Frankl who died in 1997 used his holocaust experiences as the basis of healing through meaning or what is now called as Letography.
Gibgot who was reigned to write the script of the upcoming adaptation will also be the executive producer along with Mary Cumuluca who represent the Frankl's estate. Gibgot finds the spirit of the movie as closer to Roberto Benigni's 1997 Italian film "Life is Beautiful" compared to other holocaust-themed film which focuses more on the horrors of the camps.
The author, according to Business Insider, wrote "Man's Search for Meaning" for only nine days shortly after his liberation from the camps."He believed in humanity, and was a beacon of forgiveness and humanism as much as Martin Luther King was for civil rights," Gibgot said. "He saved the lives of many, and would not allow himself to give in to despair. The movie is about the best and worst of humanity, but how out of the worst the best can emerge."
Meanwhile, Fuego Films is set to release its first project "Heart of Stone", a Robert Duran biographical action film which is directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz. It is produced by both Weisleder and Silverman and stars Robert De Niro, Edgar Ramirez and Usher.
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