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MUMBAI: National Geographic Entertainment
and Imagenation Abu Dhabi will join Exclusive
Media Group and Spitfire Pictures in producing
The Way Back.
The
film will be written and directed by six-time
Academy Award nominee Peter Weir (of
The Truman Show, Dead Poets Society fame).
In October 2008, National Geographic Entertainment
and Imagenation Abu Dhabi announced a fund
that committed $100 million to develop, produce,
finance and acquire 10 to 15 films over the
following five years. The Way Back
is their first joint effort utilising this
fund.
The film stars Jim Sturgess Across the
Universe, Oscar nominee Ed Harris The
Truman Show, Apollo 13, Oscar nominee
Saoirse Ronan Atonement and Golden
Globe winner Colin Farrell In Bruges.
It is an epic adventure, which is inspired
by Slavomir Rawicz’s novel, The Long
Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom
as well as from other real-life accounts.
The
film chronicles the escape of a small group
of multi-national prisoners from a Siberian
gulag in 1940 and their epic journey over
thousands of miles across five hostile countries.
Principal photography has already started
in Bulgaria.
National Geographic Films chairman Jake
Eberts says, "Slavomir Rawicz’s
book that inspired The Way Back has
long been considered an adventurer’s
adventure, beloved by explorers, historians
and other writers. It is one of the great
escape stories of all time. Translated into
25 languages, it has the classic man-against-nature
structure but it also deals with man’s
inhumanity toward one another, man’s
capacity to help other men and man’s
ability to forgive but not to forget. It
has thrills and excitement in epic and unusual
settings, but ultimately it is about strong-willed
people fighting to connect with each other
while yearning for peace and home."
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