| The Post Office screenplay is based on Rabindranath Tagore's most famous short play/poem of the same name written in 1912 which is now in the public domain. Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. Mahatma Gandhi was enraptured to watch the play in Calcutta in 1917; W B Yeats thought it a masterpiece. In 1940, the evening before Paris fell to the Nazis, Andre Gide’s French translation was read over the radio. The writer Anita Desai wrote about Tagore's The Post Office, ”In appearance the play is as modest as a dew drop; in effect it is as profound as the ocean.”
Tagore's play was set in Bengal, India. I have set the screenplay in the present in Umbria, Italy. When I re-read Tagore’s original I was convinced that the special down-to-earth quality of the Umbrian people, the attention to family, the food, the pace of life, the magnificent countryside with its undulating hills of farmland, in short the culture, made Umbria the right setting for the story. The film can be shot in English or Italian or both.
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