Directed by James Franco from a screenplay by Franco and Matt Rager, “As I Lay Dying” is adapted from the 1930 classic American novel by William Faulkner. The story chronicles the Bundren family as they traverse the Mississippi countryside to bring the body of their deceased mother Addie to her hometown for burial.
Addie’s husband Anse and their children, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and the youngest one Vardaman, leave the farm on a carriage with her coffin – each affected by Addie’s death in a profound and different way. Their road trip to Jefferson, some forty miles away, is disrupted by every antagonistic force of nature or man: flooded rivers, injury and accident, a raging barn fire, and not least of all — each individual character’s personal turmoil and inner commotion which at times threaten the fabric of the family more than any outside force.
Published in 1930, “As I Lay Dying” holds a solid canonical position as one of Faulkner’s best, most frequently republished works, along with “The Sound and the Fury,” “Light in August” and “Absalom, Absalom!,” all of them set in the novelist’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a Mississippi state of mind as well mapped mentally by its creator as Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
“As I Lay Dying” be shown exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas nationwide starting Nov. 27.