Germany’s Til Schweiger and Russia’s Fyodor Bondarchuk are to unite as lead actors in Antalyagrad to be produced by Cloud Atlas co-producer and distributor Alexander Rodnyansky.

Scripted by Murat Ünal and Serkan Cetinkaya, the comedy is set in the Turkish holiday resort of Antalya with Schweiger and Bondarchuk heading up families living in the same hotel.  After initial antipathy, the two sides come together and forge a friendship for life.

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The Russian-German co-production between Sergei Melkumov’s Non-Stop Production and Rodnyansky’s Berlin-based A Company Consulting & Licensing, one of the co-producers of Cloud Atlas, was one of the projects to receive development support from the German-Russian Co-Development Fund at its second funding session held on the eve of the Red Square Screenings in Moscow at the weekend.

Rodnyansky announced that talks are underway “with a very well-known German director“ to helm the project, a comment that led some participants at the Screenings to speculate that Schweiger might also don the director’s hat as well as appear in front of the camera.

The idea for the film came about after Schweiger and Bondarchuk (director of $30m 3D war drama Stalingrad) met during this year’s Kinotavr film festival in June.

Schweiger had come to Sochi to present his latest directorial effort - action film Guardians (Schutzengel) - to some 500 Russian cinema-owners at the Russian exhibitors’ trade show (the film will be released by A Company’s new Russian distribution arm next January).

New projects

The other two projects supported by the German-Russian Co-Development Fund are Alexander Mindadze’s Lieber Hans, Dorogoy Peter, which was pitched at the Moscow Business Square’s co-production forum in June 2011, and Lativan-born Gabriela Tscherniak’s political action satire Comrades.

Mindadze’s screenplay is based on the real-life experiences of a German engineer in the USSR during the Second World War. The film will be a co-production between the Russian production house Passenger, which produced the director’s previous feature Innocent Saturday, and Berlin/Leipzig-based ma.ja.de. Filmproduktion (In The Fog).

Comrades will be produced by director-producer Alexei Uchitel’s Rock Films with Berlin-based Schiwago Film whose previous credits include the award-winning Oh Boy and Mein Kampf.

Cloud Atlas release

Meanwhile, A Company Distribution is limbering up for its first theatrical release with a planned 1,000-screen opening for Cloud Atlas in Russian cinemas on Nov 8 in cooperation with 20th Century Fox. This will be the first international release after the film’s US launch on Oct 26.

A day later, on Nov 9, Cloud Atlas will be rolled out by Kino Swiat in Poland and Alexandra Films in Bulgaria. A Company’s subsidiary EEAP  will release the film during November through Pro Rom Media for Romania, ACME Film for the Baltic States and the Cinemania Group for Ex-Yugoslavia.

In Hungary, the release will be handled by Budapest Film and in the Czech Republic and Slovakia by EEAP CZ-SK, both subsidiaries of A Company, while the Ukrainian release will be managed by EEAP’s new partner B&H.

Forthcoming releases by A Company’s Russian operation include Renny Harlin’s The Dyatlov Pass (February 2013) and Machete Kills (April 2013).