The 86-year-old Italian legend returned to cinema in November after a ten-year hiatus with a role in her son Edoardo Ponti’s The Life Ahead.
On Wednesday, the Polish Film Institute said in a tweet that Loren has been cast by Polish veteran director Skolimowski in his new project, entitled Balthazar.
The institute added: “It is not yet clear what role Sophia Loren, a winner of two Oscars, will play.”
The film will be a contemporary interpretation of Robert Bresson’s classic 1966 movie Au Hasard Balthazar.
Skolimowski, who wrote the dialogue for Roman Polanski’s 1962 masterpiece Knife in the Water, “has long had a great fondness for the work by the French master”, the tweet added.
Inspired by a passage from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's classic novel “The Idiot”, Au Hasard Balthazar follows a donkey as he changes owners, most of whom treat him badly. The film is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all time.
The journey of the donkey in Skolimowski's re-make of Balthazar begins in a Polish circus and ends in an Italian slaughterhouse.
“Handed over from hand to hand, [the donkey] meets both good and bad people on its way. It is a road movie which is both bitter, but also full of warmth,” the Polish Film Institute added in its tweet.
The premiere of Balthazar, a Polish-Italian co-production, is scheduled for November 2021.
Skolimowski, 82, is one of Poland’s top internationally-renowned directors. His credits include Identification Mark, Barrier, Walkover, Hands Up, Deep End, Four Nights with Anna, and Essential Killing.
Sophia Loren, 85, starred in such popular films as The Fall of the Roman Empire, Two Women, Marriage Italian Style, More than a Miracle, and Voyage. In 1991, she received a Life Achievement Academy Award.
(jh-mk/pk)
Source: PAP