Desert Warrior

Locarno Festival Chief Giona A. Nazzaro on Scoring Caleb Landry Jones’s Passion Project and Why the Lineup Reflects the Festival’s New ‘Curated Diversity’ Mantra 4 days ago ‘God Particle’ Physicist Fabiola Gianotti to Get Feature Biopic by ‘The Invisible Witness’ Director Stefano Mordini (EXCLUSIVE) 5 days ago ‘White Lotus’ Star Sabrina Impacciatore to Play Tormented Therapist in Prime Video Psychological Thriller With Alessandro Borghi 5 days ago British director director Rupert Wyatt (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”) is shooting Saudi Arabia-set actioner “Desert Warrior” featuring a top notch international cast led by “Captain America” star Anthony Mackie and Aiysha Hart (“Mogul Mowgli,” “Colette”). MBC Studios , the production arm of prominent Middle East broadcaster MBC Group, has teamed up with U.S. producer Jeremy Bolt (“Resident Evil”) and Stuart Ford ’s AGC Studios on the big-budget period epic set in 7th century Arabia. Pic, which started filming in September in NEOM, a futuristic city being built in the Tabuk province of northwestern Saudi Arabia, is being touted as the kingdom’s first tentpole movie and Saudi-owned MBC’s biggest production to date. The shoot is expected to continue for three more months, a statement said. Besides the two leads, the “Desert Warrior” cast also comprises Ben Kingsley, Sharlto Copley (“District 9”) and Ghassan Massoud (“Kingdom of Heaven”). Zeinab Abu Alsamh, MBC Studios KSA general manager, in the statement called “Desert Warrior” “a testament to our ambition towards producing premium content for global audiences” and underlined that it’s “a tale of adventure, with a fierce female hero at the forefront of the story.” The tale takes place at a time when Saudi Arabia was made up of rival, feuding tribes forever at each other’s throats. Emperor Kisra (Kingsley) has a reputation for being utterly ruthless. So when the Arabian princess Hind (Hart) refuses to become Kisra’s concubine, the stage is set for an epic confrontation. Wayne Borg, managing director of media industries at NEOM, pointed out that, “Attracting a production of the scale of ‘Desert Warrior’ as our first feature film highlights the confidence the film industry has in our ability to deliver a seamless production experience.” Saudi’s ambitions to build a film industry have been hindered by the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and reports that appear to implicate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the assassination, which prompted media companies from the U.S. and elsewhere to clam up. But Hollywood now seems to be tiptoeing back in. Cameras are also set to roll in Saudi in mid-November on Gerard Butler action thriller “Kandahar,” directed by Ric Roman Waugh, which MBC is co-producing and co-financing along with The Capstone Group and CAA Media Finance. AGC International, the international sales and distribution arm of Ford’s AGC Studios, will handle worldwide sales on “Desert Warrior.” Your data can be used to monitor for and prevent unusual and possibly fraudulent activity (for example, regarding advertising, ad clicks by bots), and ensure systems and processes work properly and securely. It can also be used to correct any problems you, the publisher or the advertiser may encounter in the delivery of content and ads and in your interaction with them. The choices you make regarding the purposes and entities listed in this notice are saved and made available to those entities in the form of digital signals (such as a string of characters). This is necessary in order to enable both this service and those entities to respect such choices. Your device might be distinguished from other devices based on information it automatically sends when accessing the Internet (for instance, the IP address of your Internet connection or the type of browser you are using) in support of the purposes exposed in this notice. Information regarding which content is presented to you and how you interact with it can be used t