Hamlet Unbound, a long-feature film by Hugo Santander

A group of Union leaders, well aware of Hamlet's melancholy, hire a professional actor, who skilfully personifies Hamlet's father's ghost in a cemetery, thus persuading him that Claudius, his uncle, murdered his father in order to marry Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother.Hamlet, who has fallen in love with Ophelia -his psychologist, turns ill-mannered as he discovers her pregnancy. He suspects that Polonius, her father, has encouraged her to keep the baby in order to force him to marry her. Hamlet becomes distracted, as he spends his time producing a short-film.

Hamlet screens his film to his family and friends. Claudius gets particularly offended, as Hamlet's short film alludes to him and Gertrude. He hires then two of Hamlet's ex-lovers -Rosencrantz and Guilderstern, in order to find out the cause of Hamlet's resentment.

Meantime, Polonius decides to intervene, just to be brutally murdered by Hamlet. Ophelia loses her mind soon after. Hamlet is then sent to Colombia, escorted by his ex-lovers, who are secretly ordered to execute Hamlet in order to impart 'justice'.

Hamlet, however, manages to get rid of her bodyguards. Back in Philadelphia, Hamlet learns of Ophelia's madness and suicide, though there are rumours that she has been strangled by Laertes.

Soon after, in a tennis court, Hamlet's tragic fate unfolds...

I am aware of the controversies that my own free interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet might rise. I started to shooting the film in 1997, while completing my MFA at Temple University. At first I wanted it to be my thesis project, but given the fierce opposition I found amongst some professors and students (one of them told me that too many foreigners were desecrating the monuments of English culture, another that Hamlet must be performed by a blonde actor), I decided to produce it outside the university. Then, as now, I was firmly persuaded that Hamlet is the play that best expresses the whirlwinds and storms of youth.

Most of the production of 'Hamlet Unbound' was completed by the end of the summer 1998. Almost immediately I was hired by the Catholic University of Portugal as an Assistant Professor, a move that later on brought me to Manchester, Bishkek, Orlando and London. This continuous exodus delayed the final post-production of the film.

It is my impression, though, that the sensitivity of the Media has greatly evolved since 1998. The tragic events of 9/11 have somehow reduced the gap between the so-called first and third-world countries. The prosperous world has painfully come to understand that the injustices endured by the peoples of Asia, Africa and South America affect in the long run the lives of the men and women who work in Broadway or Covent Garden.

Our conceptual referential points have changed as well since Shakespeare's time. Thus today we praise science instead of religion, hypocrisy instead of courage, duty instead of honour, selfishness instead of vice, conceit instead of contempt

'Hamlet Unbound' is an independent play, as well as an adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'. The film desecrates all the predominant how-Hamlet-must-be-staged clichés. I still preserve the story line, though I render a new fresh interpretation more suitable to our sensitivity and morality. The dead of Polonius and Ophelia's madness, which most directors stage with indifference, become in 'Hamlet Unbound' the most delicate, if not the most tragic, events.

The film is in itself a political statement. The fact that a Colombian-born non-native-English-speaker actor and filmmaker be capable of producing his own adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet', with a non-existent budget and making use of the recent digital technology, proves the fragility of the most ancient hierarchies of Art and Culture.

'Hamlet Unbound' is the first serious attempt to democratize the bard in the Anglo-Saxon world. Shakespeare is after all a writer that, as Homer, as Cervantes and Tolstoy, belongs to all women and men, regardless of their ethnicity, age or place of birth.

First viewers of 'Hamlet Unbound' are fascinated by the plasticity of the images. I achieved a colorful film by making use of natural scenarios, rarely repeating a location. For about eight months we use the city of Philadelphia as our main location, day and night : universities, buildings facades, derelict tennis courts, theatres and even cemeteries. What we read at the introduction of Henry V does not only applies to theatre today, but also to film and video making:

And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these wall
are now confined two mighty monarchies...

(Henry V, Prologue, 17-20)