Vasilios Bouzas is one of many Greek Australians who migrated to Australia with his parents at a young age. Today, Vasilios is a medical scientist, who was driven to write his novel The Curse in compensation for the emotional comfort he needed to cope with the grief of losing his mother, Xanthi Bouzas.
To this day, he says, he still misses her warmth and her presence immensely. Bouzas’ novel has now been optioned to become a major motion picture. The Curse, a new supernatural psychological thriller, developed by independent distribution and production company MOMO films, and based on the novel by Vasilios Bouzas, is a novel about Luke Whelan, a young boy, dying from terminal cancer.
Luke will be saved by an old woman, and gifted with a precious gift – to save people’s lives by touching them. The gift will turn out as a curse – by saving people’s lives, Luke is ageing very quickly. To reverse this process, he has to kill another person. Once the precious boy is discovered by others – good and bad, God and Satan, criminals and the US government – he will have to make the ultimate decision of good versus evil.
“My life changing moment came when I lost my mother on 12 November 2005. Two incidents haunted me for years in respect to my mother’s death. Firstly, the night before she was diagnosed, she asked me to feel her stomach. I remember it being hard, hard as rock when I felt it. Secondly, the day she died. In the emergency department, a nurse came out and asked me to quickly come inside and hold my mother’s hand. I got on my knees, held her hand and whispered a silent prayer. The next voice I heard was ‘time of death’. I felt helpless, holding her hand, not being able to do anything to save her. I started crying. It was a son crying for his dead mother,” Vasilios says.
These two dramatic memories kept playing over and over in Vasilios’ head for two and a half years, and had eventually inspired him to write The Curse. “After my mother’s death, I travelled with my family to Greece and India. I used this time to reflect upon my life and its purpose. The biggest part of the novel was written on the island of Lefkada. The olive trees, the locals, the old town, sitting for hours staring at the house my mother grew up in – all gave me so much strength and inspiration to keep writing the novel.”
India was another focal point for developing his writing, and his wife’s native city of Bangalore. “The blend of rich cultures was an inspiration for my writing.” The adaption for The Curse is being written by South Australian screenwriter Luke Clayson, and produced by MOMO films. The next step is to convert the treatment into a feature screenplay for shooting in 2013, once enough funding has been raised through the crowdfunding online platform (www.pozible.com).
If you want to donate to the campaign to bring The Curse to life, visit website www.pozible.com/thecurse Until now, around 23 per cent of the funds have been raised, with 57 days left to go till the campaign closes, on 30 January 2013. The Kindle edition of the Vasilios Bouzas’ book, The Curse, has recently been released. The eBook is now available on Amazon, Apple iBookstore, Booki.sh, with Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Booku, and other leading eBook retailers to follow in the coming weeks. Downloading Kindle on your PC is free once you purchase the book ($4.99).
