Michael winterbottom talks about 1930's terrorism British movie 'Promised Land'

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Killer Inside Me is currently showing at  the cinemas in and around the country and is a fine example on how fearless British director Michael Winterbottom is when it comes film making, so now the attention for him focuses on his next project The Promised Land a terrorism movie set in British occupied Palestine.

Winterbottom recently caught up with ComingSoon“Right now, we’re wanting to do a film set in Palestine in the 1930s about British police chasing Jewish terrorist groups,”

“There’s a guy called Avraham Stern, who was one of the leaders of the Jewish underground from when Britain was controlling Palestine, so it’s set in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and it’s about police trying to capture Stern and Stern trying to kill the police. It’s based on a true story.”

The Zionists where a group responsible for many terrorist attacks during the 1930’s & 1940’s targetting British authorities and Stern was the founder of the organisation and there aim was to allow Jews to come together and form a Jewish state. This man was an academic and at one point he held out an opening hand to invite the nazis to let his group ‘transfer’ the European Jews into the new state and fight against a common enemy. By helping the Nazi’s fight the British during World War 2 they would help with the british in palestine, he never heard anything from the nazi  high command again despite some support.

This sounds like a fascinating story but it’ll also be a very sensitive one as we know the era in and around World War 2 is an period of earth’s history no one wants to see happen but as its focusing on the British rule of Palestine I’m very interested in seeing how Winterbottom handles the story. Question’s maybe asked will it be handled with  Sympathetic view of one of the sides involved?

So who can we expect to be in it? As for the British Police/Army  Colin Firth will be a British part Not the part of Stern as early reports suggested…

“We’ve been working on the story … for a couple years, so last year, we went out to look at locations and we’ve cast the English police parts, that’s Jim Sturgess, Matthew MacFadyen and Colin Firth, so they’re the three main English guys, but we haven’t cast the Jewish parts yet.”

“We did quite a lot of research, it’s based on two policemen called Wilkin (Sturgess) and Morton (MacFadyen), real policemen, so we just did our own research on that, and as I say, they’re chasing this guy called Stern who is one of the leaders of the underground.”

The end of the source article does have a few spoilers so if you want read the rest of the article (about 2 small columns), click here to read the rest of the post, other than that The Promised Land is scheduled to start filming in the Autumn with a 2011 release date.