Alicia Vikander, Rupert Friend circle Country of Last Things

Alejandro Chomski (Asleep in the Sun, Today and Tomorrow) is to direct an adaptation of best-selling author Paul Auster’s acclaimed dystopian novel In The Country of Last Things. Auster has collaborated with Chomski on the script. Alicia Vikander is in talks to star alongside Rupert Friend who is attached.

UK producers Carola Ash of Future Films division 2B Pictures (Last Passenger, Cracks) and Alexandra Stone (Young Adam, Kidulthood) of CMP Film Ltd are producing with French outfit Cineteve. The team will be in Berlin looking for European partners on the 3m euro-budgeted production which will shoot in Europe later this year.

The drama charts a young woman’s journey through an imaginary, apocalyptic country where she hopes to find her lost brother. On the way, the woman falls in love with a foreign journalist who is trying to gather information about the land in the hope of rescuing its history and their own.

Rising star Alicia Vikander, who stars in Berlinale Competition entry A Royal Game and recently played in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina, is in advanced talks to play the female lead with Rupert Friend, who recently starred in Renee Harlen war-drama 5 Days of War, attached to play her lover.

Auster’s novel was translated into 42 languages.