Gorgeous Monica Bellucci will star in Rhinos Season, the follow up to Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi‘s art film success No One Knows About Persian Cats.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice star, just confirmed to Italian newspaper ‘La Repubblica’ that she had enrolled the cast of the new Ghobadi’s film. Bellucci was recently in Romania, where her 2010 The Whistleblower was set — a drama telling experiences of a Nebraska cop (Rachel Weisz) who served as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia. Bellucci described ‘Rhinos Season’ as “a political film” which starts from before the revolution in Iraq and fast forward to the present day. Rumor has that it’s
also a great love story in which I will play an Iranian woman,”
Bellucci told us.
Expatriated 1960s-70s’ Iranian megastar Behrouz Vossoughi, who made more than 90 movies in Iran before he moved to Los Angeles after the Shah was overthrown in 1979, is also attached.
Shot in secret and featuring extraordinary performances by real underground musicians (around 2,000 illegal bands in Tehran), ‘No One Knows About Persian Cats’ is both a sing to and a criticism of the former hometown of Ghobadi and a vital salute of an entire generation of Iranians motivated towards personal and creative freedom. The movie took the Special Jury Prize in the Cannes fest’s Un Certain Regard section in 2009 and was released stateside last year by IFC. It’ll be interesting to see how well Ghobadi will follow up such a great flick.
While other production details are still vague, Turkish producer Menderes Demir (I Saw the Sun) will be the picture’s production manager.
And production will start in Turkish locations in March.
