The trailer for the highly-anticipated adaptation of Lloyd Jones’ novel Mr Pip has been released. The film stars British actor Hugh Laurie (House, Fry and Laurie) and was adapted and directed by Andrew Adamson. The central role of Matilda is played by Bougainville teenager Xzannjah Matsi. Scenes were filmed on location is Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and in various parts of New Zealand. The film will be released in New Zealand cinemas on the 3rd of October with an international release to follow.
About Mr Pip
Mr Pip by New Zealand author Lloyd Jones was published in 2006. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The story follows Matilda who lives on an island somewhere in the Pacific, but this is no paradise. Civil war is a fact of life, though at first the village is largely left alone by the soldiers and the rebel fighters. The school is closed but then Mr Watts, the only white man on the island, steps forward to do what he can to help. He begins to read aloud to the class from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr Dickens. Soon Dickens’ hero Pip starts to come alive for Matilda. She writes his name in the sand and decorates it with shells. Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. But Matilda is not the only one who believes in Pip. And, on an island at war, the power of the imagination can be a dangerously provocative thing.
Lloyd Jones has worked as a journalist and covered Papua New Guinea’s blockade of Bougainville during the 1990s. He is also a celebrated novelist. His other books include Hand Me Down World and The Book of Fame.
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