Budapest will be an adaptation of cultic Brazilian singer-songwriter Chico Buarque's best-selling novel of the same title. His three books, "Turbulence," "Benjamin" (which has been turned into a film) and "Budapest" have sold a combined 500,000 copies.

Production details are few, but the Hungarian shoot is provisionally set to last about four weeks beginning in March 2007 after the Brazilian sequences are completed, sources close to the production told FNE at the Fourth Manaus Amazonas Film Festival in Brazil earlier this month. The Brazilian segment will take a couple of months.

No Hungarian co-producer is known to have come on board yet.

Just as Kafka and Lars von Trier created works about the United States without setting foot in the country, Buarque, 60, has never visited Budapest, a point critics latched onto when his book came out some years ago.

The choice of Budapest as the setting for the story was inspired by a Hungarian girlfriend, as well as Hungary's participation in the 1954 World Cup. Brazil and Hungary also share a historical pattern: the Brazilian military regime ended in 1989, the same year the Soviet bloc collapsed in Eastern Europe.

Carvalho, 60, best known for his camera work on Walter Salles' award-winning Central Station, previously tried his hand at directing on Cazuza, a biopic about the cultic singer, collaborating with co-director Sandra Werneck. His credits as a cinematographer includes Walter Salles' Behind the Sun, Hector Babenco's Carandiru, and two Karim Ainouz films, Madame Sata and Suely in the Sky.