Producer Joni Levin has announced that Peter Weir’s “The Way Back,” which she and husband Keith Levin produced, will be hitting theaters this December for a limited, presumably Oscar-qualifying release before going wide early next year on January 21.
The film stars Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Mark Strong and Saoirse Ronan, and centers on a group of seven prisoners who escape a Siberian labor camp in 1940 and attempt to trek thousands of miles across hostile terrain to India and their freedom. Harris plays an American inmate, Farrell a bad-boy Russian, Sturgess a Polish prisoner and Ronan a young Russian on the run who meets up with the fugitives.
While it had been touted as a potential Cannes feature, the pic has been noticeably absent on all festival fronts with another film making similar plays — some nature film by someone named Malick or something — probably doing Weir a world of good by taking all the pressure and hype. That said, Levin has now seemingly unveiled the film’s planned unspooling through her personal Facebook page as she writes:
Distribution comes courtesy of small shingle, Exclusive, with news of a release certainly a long time coming considering the film shot back in early 2009 in Bulgaria, Morocco, and India and has apparently been test screening intermittently since.
Should make for quality, late season viewing. The prison-escape epic is based on Slavomir Rawicz’s novel “The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom” and will mark Weir’s first foray on the big screen since 2003’s “Master And Commander.”