Zoe Saldana
who has already appeared in several high-profile films,including Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,The Terminal,Star Trek and Avatar,will now be seen in the role of a lethal female assassin in her new film,Colombiano,co-written and co-produced by French filmmaker Luc Besson. To meet the strenuous physical demands of the role,the lithe,33-year-old actressa former dancerwas trained by Navy Seals and police officers as well as by a stunt choreographer and stunt coordinator. Its easy for me to kick and do all of these cartwheels and shoot a bow and arrow, she says with a laugh,but when you are in front of a human being and its about reacting and dodging and punching them 8230; That was very new and very hard.
Circumstance,
written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz,is a film that chronicles the coming of age of two young women in contemporary Iran. The movie stars Sarah Kazemy,a 22 year law student as Shireen whose friendship with her classmate Atafeh Nikohl Boosheri,turns erotic as they navigate a circuit of illicit parties offering drink,drugs,loud Western music and banned films. The situation becomes more complicated when Atafehs troubled older brother,Reza Sixo Safai,also falls in love with Shireen. Some elements of the film draw on Keshavarzs own experience and observations. Though she grew up in Brooklyn and New Jersey,she spent summers with her cousins in Shiraz,a city of 1.5 million in southern Iran. The party sequences are based on things she witnessed as a teenager,she said.
Jessica Chastains
career trajectory whizzing from unknown-ish actress with six completed movies waiting for release to next big thing,means that almost every day holds something brand new for her. She seems to have burst all of a sudden onto the big screen,for the past four years or so she was becoming something of a trending topic in Hollywood. It started with Al Pacino,who cast her as the sulky princess in his as-yet-unreleased film Wilde Salome,and praised her to Terrence Malick,who cast her in The Tree of Life. Then Malick spread the word to Steven Spielberg,whose company,DreamWorks,made The Help; to Jeff Nichols,the writer-director of Take Shelter; and to John Hillcoat,who put her in his movie The Wettest County in the World,due next year.