A British film crew shooting a drama about a plague outbreak in Italy has been caught up in the very real panic over coronavirus in the region.
The 18-strong team is filming at the UNESCO-ranked Godi Malinverni villa in Veneto, a region where there are now 58 cases of the virus.
“It’s all a bit crazy that this is all happening while we’re telling a story about a very similar thing,” said writer-director Nicholas Hulbert, 26, who is making an independent short film loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th century classic The Decameron.
In that book a group of Florentines escape to a countryside villa to wait out an epidemic of bubonic plague by telling each other stories. In Hulbert’s film The Heptameron, also set during the Black Death, a young woman attends a dinner party and ends up spreading the disease to the other guests.
Actor Rachel Browne on the set of The Heptameron in Lugo di Vicenza, Italy | Blazej Mikula
In Italy the spread of Coronavirus, spreading out from the north-eastern regions of Lombardy and Veneto, has claimed 11 lives, and led to the quarantining of around 50,000 people.
So far the film crew are healthy and have not been quarantined — but they have been stockpiling food as a precaution, and are aware they may have to go into self-imposed confinement when they fly home.
“We’re watching the news, we’re hearing about it, we’re seeing the shops are underprepared, but it feels like it’s getting closer and closer because of that,” said Hulbert, whose production company Raunkiaer Films is in charge of the project.
Lead actor Rachel Browne, 28, from Dublin, said: “It feels quite surreal.”
“We’re not in and amongst the hysteria of local Italians but it’s something we talk about every day. Getting into character is a lot easier that way when it’s actually happening to you in real life,” she said.