The short-story-to-movie genre is one of my favorites. The already challenging genre of a compact and capacious story-telling, condensed dialogue, or rendering of the calendar as an inadequate and obsolete reference for the passing of time intersects with the cinematographic intent of visual narration. Short stories allow the musical accordion of narration to be opened and expanded, while novels often require editing and compression. Neither is better than the other.
Think Bartleby (2001), based on Herman Melville's story "Bartleby, The Scrivener" (1853), Blow-Up (1966), based on Julio Cortázar's "Las babas del diablo" ("The Devil's Drool") (1959), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (1922)," or All About Eve (1950), based on Mary Orr's "The Wisdom of Eve."For an incomplete list of short stories turned movies, check out Emily Temple at LitHub.
Not on the list is The Other Barrio, based on the short story by the same name by Alejandro Murguia. San Francisco Poet Laureate (2013-2017), the first Latinx person to hold the honor. Murguia also wrote the screenplay.
"A noir crime-buster. As if ripped from today's headlines reporting evictions, fires, and protests in the streets, "The Other Barrio" follows investigator Roberto Morales as he sifts through the suspicious circumstances of a fatal fire in a residential hotel in San Francisco's rapidly gentrifying Mission District and finds himself face to face with murder in the streets, corruption at City Hall and his own demons….set against the current epidemic of evictions and gentrification, "The Other Barrio" is a fictionalized account of true events."
The trailer is available here. "The Other Barrio" short story can be found in the compilation San Francisco Noir, published by City Lights Books.
"Alejandro Murguía is the author of Southern Front, and This War Called Love (both winners of the American Book Award). His non-fiction book The Medicine of Memory highlights the Mission District in the 1970s during the Nicaraguan Solidarity movement. He is a founding member and the first director of The Mission Cultural Center. He was a founder of The Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, and co-editor of Volcán: Poetry From Central America. Currently, he is a professor in Latina Latino Studies at San Francisco State University."
Here are the Blow-Up, Bartleby, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and All About Eve trailers.
