Behrooz Hashemian, co-producer of Michael Winterbottom's Berlin competition film In This World, is preparing a new film that looks tailor-made for Berlin director Dieter Kosslick's favoured themes of tolerance, diversity and multi-cultural understanding.
Waiting For The Clouds, by Turkish director Yesim Ustaoglu (director of Journey To The Sun) centres around a Turkish family which takes in a Greek orphan threatened with deportation. Ustaoglu will shoot the picture with largely unknown actors in March and April around the Turkish Black Sea and in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Through his Paris-based company Silkroad Production, Hashemian has put together a panoply of public and private funding to complete the Euros 2.3m budget.
Structured as a French-German-UK-Turkish-Greek co-production Clouds involves finance from the UK's Film Council, a mini-treaty between France and Germany, Eurimages and the Hubert Bals Foundation. The film also won development from the Sundance Lab and was pre-sold for Euros 130,000 to NHK of Japan. Multinational European broadcaster Arte is also on board. Celluloid Dreams has come on board to handle international sales.
'We are not trying to change the world, but aim to open the eyes of the world to some of the cultures of a region in which it is too easy to see only conflict,' says Hashemian, who worked for over a decade in the US.
Silkroad is also actively preparing three other pictures: road movie Ghahrekhaneh from Iran, Turkish director Kutluk Attaman's Kitchen Of Roses and Jeffolah, a picture set in a school on the Iranian-Pakistani border for religious activists and infiltrators.
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