EXCLUSIVE: The project was unveiled at Cannes.
Alumni Films, the new film finance, production and development company based in Los Angeles, has come on board to fully finance and produce its first project, an untitled high-concept revenge thriller that Alex Litvak (Predators (pictured), The Three Musketeers) will write.
Alumni Films president Alexander Izotov and development executive Natasha Dubrovskaya unveiled the title in Cannes.
“It is a revenge thriller that will be about an American entrepreneur who goes to Russia in the 90s and gets caught up in the middle of the Russian Klondike,” Dubrovskaya said.
The entrepreneur ends up in prison. By the time he is released 12 years later, the country has changed. The $30m thriller will be set in Russia, Hong Kong and New York.
Alumni plans a $5m development fund and a complementary financing and production fund. Dubrovskaya will head the development fund, which includes an untitled documentary about three Russian hackers. The idea is to make the documentary and develop a separate dramatic feature based on the same story.
There are 10 investors behind the fund hailing from the Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, the biggest business school in eastern Europe. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev is chairman of the Skolkovo International advisory board.
“We are educating [the investors] in how the film business works,” Dubrovskaya said, adding that the goal was to bolster the Russian film business.
“They (the investors) will feel that Russians are not just being portrayed as cliched villains in James Bond films but we want to create complex, human stories.”
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