Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Spain team for Pinochet thriller

Chilean filmmaker Juan Ignacio Sabatini is to direct a feature about an attempted assassination of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Sabatini, best known as the director of Red Eyes, a locally lucrative 2010 documentary about the Chilean national football team, has co-written and will also produce thriller Los Fusileros, which is being set up as a Chile-Agentina-Colombia-Spain co-production.

Sabatini will produce through his Chilean company Villano with Sudestada Cine (Argentina), 64-A Films (Colombia) and Potenza Producciones (Spain). Potenza most recently produced Matías Bizé’s The Memory of Water.

An adaptation of a book by journalist Juan Cristóbal Peña, Los Fusileros tells the story of a cell of the armed wing of the Chilean Communist Party that set an ambush to kill Pinochet in their fight against the dictatorship. They failed.

The character-driven thriller, which won’t have a linear narrative, focuses on the point of view of three of the members of the cell that led the attack: Ramiro, a former PE teacher who has devoted his life to an active opposition to the regime; Sacha, a youngster more interested in football than politics and Tamara, a sociologist from a wealthy family who has become the only woman commander in the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front.

With a budget of $1.6m (€1.46m), the film is set to start shooting in July 2017.

Germany’s Global Screen is handling international sales.