Ian McKellen To Star In Ken McMullen Feature ‘Hamlet Within’; NFT Collection Release Planned As Art Cinema’s Film Heads To Cannes Market

Jesse Whittock
·1 min read
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EXCLUSIVE: Ian McKellen is among the stars of Ken McMullen’s Hamlet Within, a part-documentary feature investigating the mythology around the Shakespeare play, which is headed to the Cannes Market.

The Art Cinema and Scape Films co-production will be released as an NFT collection on newly formed Blockchain ecosystem platform Cineverse, which allows filmmakers, distributors and producers to market their features directly.

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The film will launch in Cannes at an event on May 21, with Screenbound International Pictures selling it at the market.

Hamlet Within is billed as a “radical cinematic investigation into the myth of Hamlet, its origins and its enduring appeal across cultures and systems of beliefs.” Part-doc and part-fictional discourse, it is shot in five acts and framed by a prelude and an epilogue and billed as “a collage of acted monologues and staged dialogues referencing Hamlet’s most famous soliloquies.”

It will feature the likes of the late John Shrapnel (101 Dalmatian), his son Lex Shrapnel (Captain America), Ben Turner (The Kite Runner), Gabriella Wright (The Tudors), Anne Sophie Refskou, Shakespeare scholar Richard Wilson and Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who passed away in 2004. John Shrapnel and Derrida will appear through archive interviews that McMullen (Hamlet Revenant) has conducted over many years.

Art Cinema, a female-led collective of creatives founded by interdisciplinary producer Gisele Phillips is also working with writer and director McMullen on another film, Head Of State. The film is set during the English civil war and features portrayals of figures such as Oliver Cromwell and Charles II.

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