We have updated our Privacy Policy Please take a moment to review it. By continuing to use this site, you agree to the terms of our updated Privacy Policy.
Diary of a Film
An auteur, together with his lead actors, is at a prestigious European festival to premiere his latest film.
Alone one morning at a backstreet café, he strikes up a conversation with a local woman who takes him on a walk to uncover the city’s secrets, historic and personal. As the walk unwinds, a story of love and tragedy emerges, and he begins to see the chance meeting as fate. He is entranced, wholly clear in his mind: her story must surely form the basis for his next film.
This is a novel about cinema, flâneurs, and queer love – it is about the sometimes troubled, sometimes ecstatic creative process, and the toll it takes on its makers.
But it is also a novel about stories, and the ongoing question of who has the right to tell them.
Read More
Alone one morning at a backstreet café, he strikes up a conversation with a local woman who takes him on a walk to uncover the city’s secrets, historic and personal. As the walk unwinds, a story of love and tragedy emerges, and he begins to see the chance meeting as fate. He is entranced, wholly clear in his mind: her story must surely form the basis for his next film.
This is a novel about cinema, flâneurs, and queer love – it is about the sometimes troubled, sometimes ecstatic creative process, and the toll it takes on its makers.
But it is also a novel about stories, and the ongoing question of who has the right to tell them.
Reviews
Diary of a Film is an achingly intimate novel--tender and wise like Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet through the lens of Luca Guadagnino. Govinden drops us into the fray of an Italian film festival only to reveal a secret garden of quiet and stolen moments with a director whose film is about to premiere. In hotel rooms, abandoned buildings, and in a whisper in front of the international press corps, joy blooms, ideas are born, liberties are taken. Trust holds it all afloat. A stunning meditation on the art of creation and the nature of the artist
Vicariously I experienced again the freedom to travel and visit a European city just to catch an exhibition, go dancing or merely escape the mundane for a weekend. Diary of a Film is about seeing the familiar in new ways, finding friends wherever we are and coming to terms with the past being the past. Set amongst the gourmet surroundings of a Northern Italian film festival, it reads like an elegy for a just-gone era
A meditation on film-making, art, grief and privacy. Constructed with the skill of a watchmaker, with a precise, consistent pitch of intensity
A wonderful mediation on why we tell stories, and who gets to tell those stories - and the grief of your masterpiece belonging only to its audience once it's finished. Sentence by sentence, one of the most beautiful novels I've read all year
Diary of a Film is about how art ravages and redeems. It is about the responsibility artists bear both for their art and the world that must contain it; about the imperative to create something substantial in a world that moves too quickly to capture beauty to one's satisfaction; it is about living an ideal, committing to a principle whatever the potential cost, leaping into love and trusting that it will hold you
