An Epic, Global, Multi-Season TV Adventure
Inspired & Based on...
"But Alphonse, here’s the thing. I’m a cop right? I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe in evidence, history, the truth. But I’ll let you in on a secret. I also believe in the lies. The stories, the narratives, the... alibis. And I try to write books here in this den of mine because I know that really those things exist together, weaving in and out - stories within stories, truths within lies, deaths within lives. Y’know?
But people don’t want to think that’s true in real life. They want it nice and clean. And people like me to clean things up. But some things... are so fucking weird, I don’t know how to make ‘em nice and shiny. They’re too murky, too dark, I can’t see the story. Within the story. Within the story.
And this morning, meeting you, finding the book with my name on it, you speaking French just like in the book, us finding the book just how the first pages describe finding the book, and then coming home and Googling my own name for the first-fuckin-time-so-help-me- God and reading that the author of that fucking book, called Potocki, killed himself in 1816 with a silver bullet...
All of that... is too much for my small brain to take. You know?"
Alphonse Jones
is in a crisis.
A smart, beautiful but troubled young writer living in the capitalist warzone of modern New York City, she lives
a regular check-chasing, screen-obsessed deskjob reality,
but one beset by disturbing and prophetic dreams.
a regular check-chasing, screen-obsessed deskjob reality,
but one beset by disturbing and prophetic dreams.
haunted by the unsolved suspected suicide of her French author father Alfi when she was a child, she has reached
a crisis of identity that is starting to break
into her waking consciousness.
a crisis of identity that is starting to break
into her waking consciousness.
Something is calling her,
something of her true self she never knew existed,
but the only route to self-understanding
and freedom she has ever known -
her instinct to write and create -
is catastrophically blocked and tangled
in a morass of grief, frustration and exhaustion.
something of her true self she never knew existed,
but the only route to self-understanding
and freedom she has ever known -
her instinct to write and create -
is catastrophically blocked and tangled
in a morass of grief, frustration and exhaustion.
Then one winter's morning her life is turned upside down
when she discovers a strange old manuscript written in French in a derelict Book Shop in the Lower East Side,
an event that immediately comes alive with
the uncanny fire of fate –
resulting in a cascade of strange synchronicities
that are too many and meaningful
to be mere coincidence...
when she discovers a strange old manuscript written in French in a derelict Book Shop in the Lower East Side,
an event that immediately comes alive with
the uncanny fire of fate –
resulting in a cascade of strange synchronicities
that are too many and meaningful
to be mere coincidence...
'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa'
is one of literature's great mysteries...
A journey into the heart of storytelling and creation
A journey into the heart of storytelling and creation
itself, written in the mid 19th Century by the enigmatic
Count Jan Potocki.
The Manuscript is his one and only novel, published
The Manuscript is his one and only novel, published
after his death and the focus of endless arguments
about its true authorship, origin and meaning...
SARAGOSSA
the show
transforms potocki's novel into a universal voyage...
into the truth and the lies,
what is foolish and what is wise,
into the stories we and the world are built from,
that we tell ourselves to hide what is real
and might be dreamt into reality
if only we would let ourselves dream again...
what is foolish and what is wise,
into the stories we and the world are built from,
that we tell ourselves to hide what is real
and might be dreamt into reality
if only we would let ourselves dream again...
This story travels all the way to these origins, where the violent, surreal and ecstatic fundamentals of reality are revealed - and where the fusions and fissions of the supernatural, the fantastic, the religious, the ecological, the erotic and the political all erupt in
ONE Earth-spanning multi-season adventurE.
"I am a story, within a story, within a story.
I am Spain, I am America.
I am The Manuscript Found In Saragossa"