CATALOGUE
TULSE LUPER SUITCASES, THE
PART I - THE MOAB STORY
 
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TECHNICAL INFORMATION 

Netherlands/UK 2003, 35mm, 126 Minutes, colour-B/W, Dolby, ratio 1:1.85, length in meters/feet, 7 Reels, English

CREDITS 


Director
Peter Greenaway
Produced by
Kees Kasander
Executive Producers
Carlo Dusi

Wouter Barendrecht, Michael J. Werner
Screenplay
Peter Greenaway
Cinematography
Reinier van Brummelen
Editor
Elmer Leupen
Art Director
Billy Leliveld
Light
Daan de Boer
Music
Borut Krisznik
Sound
Janos Köporosky
Costumes
Andrea Flesch
Production Company
Kasander Film Company


CAST 


J.J. Feild
Tulse Luper
Deborah Harry
Fastidieux
Drew Mulligan
Martino Knockavelli
Yorick van Wageningen
Lephrenic
Kevin Tighe
Gottschalk
Scot Williams
Percy Hockmeister
Tom Bower
Sheriff Fender
Caroline Dhavernas
Passion
Michele Bernier
Sophie van Osterhuis
Steven Mackintosh
Zeloty
Nigel Terry and Raymond J. Barry
Figura
Jack Wouterse
Van Hoyten
Jordi Molla
Palmerion
Valentina Cervi
Cissie Colpitts
Isabella Rossellini
Mme. Moitessier
Ronald Pickup
M. Moitessier


SYNOPSIS 

THE TULSE LUPER SUITCASES is a sweeping trilogy/epic about the life and times of Tulse Luper, a man bigger than the world itself. The film covers some sixty years of recent history from 1928 when the existence of a substance called Uranium was discovered, to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1989.

Tulse Luper, a writer and project-maker, is caught in a life of prisons. There are a total of sixteen prisons in the story starting in South Wales, when Luper is ten years old, locked up for three hours by his father in a coalhouse for running the gauntlet of a series of backyard gardens to sign his name on a crumbling brick wall that collapses. Twelve years later in 1938 in Moab, Utah, Luper is arrested through his contact with an American-German family about to travel to Europe to engage exploitatively in the Second World War. Four members of this family, deeply fascinated with Luper, will act as his jailers, with others interested in uranium, around Europe for the next ten years. In the Cold War years he is imprisoned in Moscow and Siberia, before appearing in Hongkong and Kyoto. In the 1980s Luper was apparently sighted in Beijing and in Shanghai. He was last seen in a Manchurian desert. Luper learns to use his prison time, writing on the prisons walls, inventing projects in literature, theatre, film and painting, and engaging with his jailers in all manner of plots, schemes and adventures. Because of their responsibilities, jailers are as much prisoners of their prisoners as they are freemen, and this connection between jailer and prisoner permeates this project and provides a great deal of its drama.

As Luper's reputation as a writer and project-maker grows in Europe and America, so his person becomes more fictional. A large "Luper" Symposium and Exhibition is held in the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Many Luper lecturers offer their theories and propositions on the various stages of Luper's life. The central exhibit of the conference and exhibition is a collection of 92 suitcases - 92 appropriately being the atomic number of Uranium - suitcases that Luper had supposedly been associated with in his travels and prisons. Over the years, the suitcases come to light all over the world.

On the last evening of the 'Luper' New York Conference, a long awaited Luper suitcase - suitcase 92 - is opened...

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