Matthew Rhys, currently starring with Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller in The Edge Of Love, has come on board to star in Patagonia with Nia Roberts.

Marc Evans (Snow Cake) will direct and Rebekah Gilbertson (The Edge Of Love) will produce with Argentina's Oscar Kramer.

Laurence Coriat (Wonderland, A Mighty Heart) wrote the script, a road movie about a thirty-something Welsh couple travelling through Welsh settlements of Patagonia, and an elderly woman accompanied by a reluctant travelling companion. The co-production will be in Welsh and Spanish.

Robbie Little's The Little Film Company will handle sales. Patagonia will shoot in early 2009 in Argentina followed by a spring shoot in Wales.

The Film Agency For Wales is backing the project along with Boom Films, S4C and Argentina's Kramer & Sigman Films.

'To capitalise on the beauty and contrasts of the landscapes of Patagonia and Wales, we intend to shoot the Argentine sections in their summertime, when the land is defined by its aridity, heat and emptiness, followed by the Welsh scenes in wet and windy winter,' Gilbertson said.

Evans added: 'This film gets us away from the tyranny of the Anglo-American system and allows us to play on the margins. It is so hard to make foreign-language films in the present climate of distribution and exhibition. To put the language of Welsh next to the huge global language of Spanish is to find another way of working and to explore another map in terms of audience and markets. That is what is so exciting about this project.'

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