04/07/2011

The American actor of Serbo-Scottish origins, John Malkovich, will play one of the main characters in Gabriele Salvatores’ new film, Educazione siberiana (see news). Shooting will start at the end of August in Lithuania, where most of the work will be carried out and will last over summer and winter.

Malkovich has worked with European directors many times before: from Stephen Frears, who directed him in Dangerous Liasons and Mary Reilly, to the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (The Convent, I’m Going Home, A Spoken Film), as well as Bernardo Bertolucci (The Sheltering Sky), Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders (Beyond the Clouds) and Luc Besson (Joan of Arc), to mention a few.

Produced by Cattleya, Educazione siberiana was written by Stefano Rulli, Sandro Petraglia and Salvatores and is based on a book by Russian novelist Nicolai Lilin. Set in Southern Russia, it tells the story of a group of Siberian criminals over a period of ten years from 1985 to 1995. Malkovich plays the role of grandfather Kuzja, who teaches the ethical codes of “honest criminals” to his young grandson Kolyma, who’s played by Lithuanian actor Arnas Fedaraviius.

As epic as a Western, but based in eastern Europe, Gabriele Salvatores likes to define his new film as an ‘Eastern’.

(Translated from Italian)