Rising Swiss actor Joel Basman has come on board Thor Klein’s Adventures Of A Mathematician, which is being sold by Mongrel International and presented in Toronto’s International Financing Forum (September 10-11).
Basman will play Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, the boss of the film’s main protagonist, Polish emigre mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who will be played by former Berlin Shooting Star Jakub Gierszal. Gierszal is also to be seen at TIFF in Urszula Antoniak’s Beyond Words.
Here at TIFF, Basman is one of the co-stars Michael Noer’s new version of prison drama Papillon. The Swiss actor’s last feature Land Of Mine was nominated for best foreign-language film earlier this year, and he also has a role in Terrence Malick’s new historical drama, Radegund, about an Austrian conscientious objector during the Second World War.
Lena Vurma of Dragonfly Films is lead producer on Adventures Of A Mathematician, a German-Poland-Canada co-production. Polish and Canadian co-producers are, respectively, Joanna Szymanska and Mary Young Leckie (Maudie). Also new to the cast is young Polish actor Mateusz Wieclawek, who will play Ulam’s brother.
Ulam was part of America’s Manhattan project. In the early 1950s, he and Teller developed the so-called “Teller-Ulam design”, acknowledged as the basis for all thermonuclear weapons. The Polish-American boffin also played a crucial role in the development of the first electronic computers.
The $4m film is due to shoot in June next year.
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