Russia's Luxor acquires new Alexander Nevsky feature

The production by Nevsky’s own LA-based company Hollywood Storm has a cast including Kristanna Loken, Adrian Paul, Robert Davi, Matthias Hues, and world champion ballroom dancer and fitness model Oksana Sidorenko.

The screenplay by Brent Huff and George Saunders centres on a Moscow police major (played by Nevsky) who travels to Los Angeles to help the local police there investigate a series of murders in the Russian immigrant community.

After the Moscow shoot, the film will move to Los Angeles, and theatrical release is planned for December 2013.

Depardieu to play Caucasian hermit

Russian citizen Gérard Depardieu is to follow his title role in Irakli Kvirikadze’s Rasputin, which will close the Moscow International Film Festival on Saturday (June 29), with a part as a Caucasian hermit in Polish film-maker Jan Jakub Kolski’s next feature, My Mother Airam.

Speaking at the Moscow Business Square on Monday afternoon (June 24) during a showcase of Polish projects looking for co-producers, producer Michal Otlowski of NFK Distribution explained that Dépardieu’s current problems in France had prompted him to ask Kolski to move the action of the drama from the Provence to the Caucasus. 

Otlowski added that he has received “strong interest” from French producer Antoine de Clermont-Tonnerre’s MACT Productions in the $3.3m (€2.5m) production.

The Polish showcase also presented such projects as:

• Barbara Sass’ Dark Romance about a fated love affair between a Polish actress an Russian Tsarist officer stationed in Warsaw in 1890;
  
  
• Michal Otlowski’s mystery-horror period drama Veles Veles following seven stragglers from Napoleon’s shattered Great Army fleeing across the frozen wastes of Russia, which he calls ¨The Wild Bunch in snow¨;
  
  
• the Polish-Czech-Slovak co-production I, Olga Hepnarova, to be directed by FAMU graduates Petr Kazda and Tomas Weinreb with Polish DoP Jolanta Dylewska (In Darkness) behind the camera;
  
  
• Iwona Siekierzynska’s second feature Kobro about two outstanding artists who initiated the Museum of Modern Art in Lodz. Kobro recently received the Script Pro screenwriting prize which is sponsored by the Polish Film Institute and HBO Poland.

In addition, producer-director Jan Kidawa-Blonski revealed plans to direct a contemporary remake of the 1959 classic Polish film The Night Train by Jerzy Kawalerowicz.