Cape Town - Blood Diamond actor Djimon Hounsou is headed to South Africa to star in post-apocalyptic action adventure One, to be filmed in Cape Town and Johannesburg this year.
According to co-production company Main Street Films, the film will be set in a world devastated by a virus, which has compelled different ethnic groups to fight one another in search of a cure.
Hounsou’s co-star, Alexis Knapp, from the film Pitch Perfect, is captured by soldiers and sold to a medical research facility. Doctors then discover she is immune to the virus, and she becomes the world’s great hope.
The film will be directed by Murali Thalluri, and co-produced and co-financed by Main Street Films, MK Create and the Kojo Group.
It is being co-produced by Cape Town-based production company Enigma Pictures.
The National Film and Video Foundation, which promotes South African films and producers at the Cannes Film Festival, called Enigma Picture’s clinching of the co-production deal one the country’s success stories at the festival.
One is the first movie to be produced under a South African and Australian co-production treaty signed in 2011.
Hounsou, who was born in Benin, had his break-out role in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film, Amistad.
The Oscar-nominated film was based on the true story of a group of West African slaves who overpower the slavers on the ship La Amistad.
In 2000 Hounsou appeared in the box office hit Gladiator starring Russel Crowe.
In 2006 he acted opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond, which was partly filmed in Cape Town.
Recently he appeared in the James Gunn-directed Guardians of the Galaxy, which is due out later this year, and also has a role in the next Fast & Furious movie.
One is not the only upcoming film to use South Africa as a location.
According to reports in Variety and Screen Daily, Oscar-winning South African director Gavin Hood will team up with Colin Firth, Helen Mirren and Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul to direct Eye in the Sky, a drones warfare thriller.
Variety says the film will centre on how a London-based military intelligence officer, played by Mirren, attempts to capture a group of terrorists from their Kenyan safe house.
The film is being produced by eOne and Raindog Films.
According to Screen Daily, shooting will start in September.
Hood, whose film Tsotsi won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, has become one of South Africa’s most successful directors on the international stage.
His latest offering, the science fiction film Ender’s Game, based on the novel by Orson Scott Card, raked in more than $100 million (about R1 billion), but garnered some middling reviews.
Weekend Argus