Filming of García Márquez novel delayed by anti-prostitution group
Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez’s latest novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, has seen Mexican production of its film version brought to a halt by a lawsuit launched by an anti-prostitution group that claims the movie would promote child prostitution. The novel tells the story of a bachelor who for his 90th birthday decides to give himself the gift of a night of “wild love with an adolescent virgin.” The Regional Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean filed a criminal complaint with Mexico’s attorney general’s office on Monday. The complaint does not specifically name García Márquez, but instead “whoever is responsible for acts that could be constituted as the crime of condoning child prostitution.” Coalition director Teresa Ulloa said that a movie adaptation of the Colombian author’s novel would promote paedophilia and make the story accessible to a wider audience. “As a book, it does not have access to the most vulnerable people in society,” she said. “Once they make the movie, it will be in movie theatres and later it will surely be on television.” The film’s co-director and producer, Ricardo del Rio, told Mexico’s Reforma newspaper that filming, scheduled to begin late this month, had been postponed because government officials in the Mexican state of Puebla had decided to withdraw funding for the movie in light of the lawsuit. Ulloa said stopping the adaptation was her organization’s goal. We don’t want them to put García Márquez in jail. What we want is for them not to film the movie.”