Talita Facchini, Britta Egetemeier, Luiz Fernando Carvalho, and Marina Waltenberg Mauritz, Image Marife Boix-Garcia
By Talita Facchini | @talitafacchinii
About 6% of all books purchased were discovered through film or TV adaptations.
The Frankfurt Book Fair audience knows that Friday means Book-to-Screen Day — a program that has become a key moment for the convergence of publishing and the film and streaming industries. In this year’s edition, more than 500 participants joined panels, presentations, and matchmaking events dedicated to successful book adaptations.One of the day’s highlights was a conversation between Brazilian director Luiz Fernando Carvalho and Britta Egetemeier, Publisher at Penguin Verlag and member of the board at Penguin Random House Germany, about Carvalho’s new film adaptation of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. The bilingual English-Portuguese session was translated by Marina Waltenberg Mauritz.
Maria Fernanda Cândido, Image Harald Krichel
The film premiered during the same week at Frankfurt’s Deutsches Filminstitut Filmmuseum, attracting an enthusiastic audience that included many members of the local Brazilian community, as well as Carvalho himself and Brazilian actress Maria Fernanda Cândido (“Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,” The Secret Agent,” “My Hindu Friend”), who stars as G.H.
Lispector’s work is known for its intimate tone and focus on psychology, introspection, and the stream of consciousness. All these elements are central to The Passion According to G.H., which follows a middle-class woman who, after firing her maid, enters the maid’s room and experiences an existential crisis upon crushing a cockroach.
The central question of the panel was how to translate such a deeply internal narrative to the screen. For Carvalho, the connection between page and screen mirrors the multiple translations that exist for any great work of literature.
“Only one translation would not be enough for such great works,” he said. “That’s why every translation matters.”
Egetemeier added: “The good thing with good literature is that it is, in a way, universal. It’s really the language that connects with you and brings sensuality to the surface — so subtly that if it were done bluntly, it wouldn’t travel and would vanish as soon as it’s outspoken.”
Egetemeier noted that Penguin Verlag takes pride in fostering these kinds of literary dialogues — and that the house believes every book can, in some form, be adapted for the screen.
Looking ahead, Carvalho revealed that a new film, currently in production, will echo Lispector’s world once more. “It’s the story of an actress who dreams of playing G.H.,” he said. “Once this film is completed, in 2027, ‘The Passion According to G.H.’ will be screened again, so that one film mirrors the other — and we’ll see how all the desires and anxieties expressed in the first are fulfilled in the second.”
The Book-to-Screen program reflects a growing trend across publishing and audiovisual production. According to NielsenIQ’s 2023 report From Book to Film and Back to Book, about 6% of all books purchased were discovered through film or TV adaptations. Similarly, the European Audiovisual Observatory (EAO) reports that between 2015 and 2023, an average of 160 titles (TV films or series seasons) and over 1,400 hours of adapted fiction content were produced annually in Europe.
As the creative boundaries between publishing and screen storytelling continue to blur, Frankfurt’s Book-to-Screen Day stands out as an essential bridge between two industries increasingly shaping one another’s futures.
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