EXCLUSIVE: Increasingly ambitious Zurich-based film financier and producer Silver Reel Partners is to join forces with Raindog Films, the new production company set up by Oscar winning actor Colin Firth and former Sony UK Chairman Ged Doherty.

Silver Reel and Raindog are partnering on $30 million spy thriller A Foreign Country. Winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger 2012 for Best Thriller of the Year, A Foreign Country is the first installment of a trilogy of novels written by Charles Cumming about a disgraced MI6 officer called Thomas Kell. The film will see Firth returning to the spy genre following his success in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Meanwhile, in conjunction with Nancy Buirski at Augusta Films, Raindog and Silver Reel are developing another feature film, The Loving Story. Billed as “a love story set against the backdrop of tremendous social upheaval,” it tells the story of how, in the summer of 1959, after a long courtship, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter drove from their hometown in the Virginia countryside to Washington DC to be married. Two weeks later, they were arrested at their house in a nighttime raid by the sheriff for violating the state’s law banning interracial marriage.

Another new project the company is developing outside its partnership with Raindog is The Boy On The Tracks, scripted by Academy Award nominated writer Keir Pearson (Hotel Rwanda) from a book by Mara Leveritt.

Silver Reel is producing alongside Elizabeth Fowler. CAA is packaging the film, set against the backcloth of the Iran Contra scandal.

It is described as “a remarkable and powerful true story of a mother’s journey to learn the truth about the murder of her teenage son which thrusts her unknowingly into the largest cocaine smuggling and gun running operation in US history.”

“Right now, what has changed slightly is that we are working together with producers and packaging the projects. We come in earlier than before,” Silver Reel’s Claudia Bluemhuber commented of the company’s shifting strategy.

Silver Reel, which some are describing a European equivalent to Anapurna Pictures, is currently involved in such high profile pictures as Fallen, Solace, Grace Of Monaco, The Railway Man and Under The Skin.