Actress Emily Mortimer (“Hugo,” “The Newsroom”) is making her directorial debut with “Dennis,” a period romance she also wrote at A24 and Fruit Tree with quite a pair of actors assembled for the pic.
Deadline’s report on the gestating project adds that rising talent such as Alison Oliver (“The Order,” “Task”) and recent Oscar-nominee Yura Borisov (“Anora”) have been tapped to play a British student and Russian poet who fall in love in post-Cold War Moscow in the 1990s.
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The 1990s were a time of transition for the former Soviet Union, as the decade saw Moscow and Russia become more welcoming to outsiders after the end of the Cold War and establish new alliances with the West. Something that now feels like a distant memory, given current events and their invasion/war in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, and overt threats to other sovereign countries.
This is the second big project for Borisov post-Oscar nomination after being cast to star opposite Andrew Garfield and Monica Barbaro in Luca Guadagnino‘s OpenAI biopic “Artificial” at Amazon MGM Studios. That one will focus on the wild events that saw CEO Sam Altman fired and then rehired in a matter of days, a whirlwind of tech-world dramatics that could mirror David Fincher‘s “The Social Network.”
A24 (handling the pic’s financing and global distribution) and Fruit Tree have previously worked together on things like Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw The TV Glow,” “The Curse,” and Jesse Eisenberg‘s upcoming untitled musical comedy starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti.
The next big step for Mortimer’s “Dennis” is finding the supporting cast, which should attract equally talented actors.
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