The vigorous drive into larger-scale film productions by Canadian entertainment giant Alliance Atlantis continued this week with the closure of a deal to finance Francois Girard's latest - the $25m historical drama The Magician's Wife in which Geoffrey Rush will star. Kate Winslet is negotiating to join him, although her status is not yet confirmed.

Girard scored a huge specialised hit with his 1998 drama The Red Violin which grossed over $10m for Lions Gate Films. Rush and Winslet first teamed up in Fox Searchlight's Quills for which he won an Oscar nomination playing the Marquis de Sade.

In The Magician's Wife, Rush will play a French illusionist who, with his wife, is dispatched to colonial Algeria by Napoleon III to quell an uprising. Melissa Mathison, whose credits include ET - The Extra-Terrestrial, The Black Stallion and Kundun, wrote the script which is adapted from the novel by the late Brian Moore. Producers Denis Heroux and Stephane Reichel previously collaborated on an adaptation of another Moore novel - Black Robe.

Alliance Atlantis has worldwide rights to the film, excluding the US and France, and will sell rights through its international sales division while self-distributing in Canada and in the UK through its Momentum Pictures unit. ICM will handle the US sale.

The film, scheduled to shoot in August in France and Morocco, is structured as a Canada/Morocco/France/UK co-production.

Alliance Atlantis is close to wrapping up its Neil Jordan-directed thriller Double Down starring Nick Nolte and Ralph Fiennes, and is also in production on Owning Mahowny with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Minnie Driver and Ararat from writer/director Atom Egoyan.