This will be the follow up to the great Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The film stars Hiam Abbas, Frieda Pinto, Willem Dafoe, Vanessa Redgrave, Alexander Siddig and Makram Khoury. It is an adaptation of Italo-Palestinian Rula Jebreal’s book about the real life Palestinian woman Hind Husseini. Here is an official synopsis send to us by the people behind the film.
From Julian Schnabel, Academy Award nominated director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Before Night Falls and Basquiat, comes Miral, the story of four women whose lives intertwine in the starkly human search for justice, hope and reconciliation amid a world overshadowed by conflict, rage and war. The story begins in war-torn Jerusalem in 1948 when Hind Husseini (HIAM ABBASS, The Visitor, Amreeka) opens an orphanage for refugee children that quickly becomes home to 2000 orphans. One of the children is seventeen year old Miral (FRIEDA PINTO, Slumdog Millionaire) who arrived at the orphanage 10 years earlier, following her mother’s tragic death. On the cusp of the Intifada resistance, Miral is assigned to teach at a refugee camp where she falls for a fervent political activist, Hani (OMAR METWALLY, Munich, Rendition) and finds herself in a personal battle that mirrors the greater dilemma around her: to fight like those before her or follow Mama Hind’s defiant belief that education will pave a road to peace.
The film has been picked up by Weinstein Company and it is set for a December 3rd limited release date. It will also be screened at the Venice Film Festival before it gets shown to the General audiences. Schnabel did not want to screen his movie at the Cannes and chose Venice instead.
