12/10/2011

Begun a month ago in Sarajevo, shooting for Sergio Castellitto's new feature film, Venuto al mondo, is now under way in Rome. The film's team will be staying in the capital a couple of weeks and will then return to Bosnia and will make a last stop in Piedmont in December. Apart from marking the return of Penélope Cruz to the set of Italian director seven years after Don't Move (which won her the David di Donatello Award 2004 for Best Actress), the film also marks the Spanish actress's return to Rome, where last summer she took part in Woody Allen's Bop Decameron.

In Venuto al mondo, also based on a book by Margaret Mazzantini, Castellitto's wife. Cruz plays Gemma, a woman marked by civil war in Bosnia, who decides, after living many years in Rome, to go back to her city of origin, Sarajevo, together with her sixteen-year-old son. The latter is played by Castellitto and Mazzantini's oldest son, Pietro. While the male lead is America's Emile Hirsch (directed by Sean Penn in Into the Wild and recently seen in Venice in William Friedkin's Killer Joe), who plays Diego, Gemma's big love. The cast also includes Jane Birkin and Luca de Filippo.

Venuto al mondo is defined by Castellitto as "a great love story, about the eternal love between Gemma and Diego which spreads and infects all the other extraordinary characters" and is a co-production between Italy (Medusa Film, Alien Produzioni, Picomedia, Bnl and Turin's Fip) and Spain (Telecinco, Mod Producciones). It will be distributed in Italy by Medusa in autumn 2012, while Wild Bunch will take care of French distribution as well as international sales and the US.

(Translated from Italian)