Excerpt from today's Toronto Star about the movie /Blindness/... (
posted in My Michael Mahonen Site guest book by Shelly)

/Coming up later this year are a number of highly touted movies produced
with the help of seven-figure investments from Telefilm. And in 2008 the
most exciting news in Canadian cinema seems to be coming from English
Canada rather than Quebec -- as it did in 2007 with Away From Her and
Eastern Promises.

All players are being tight-lipped, but two of Telefilm's 2008 slate are
likely to be part of the main event at the Cannes Festival in May.
Festival bosses are eagerly taking a look at both *Blindness* -- an
expensive three-way co-production -- and Adoration -- a modest, personal
take on the Internet from Cannes favourite Atom Egoyan.

The world premiere of Blindness on the Côte d'Azur would cap a nine-year
struggle by producer Niv Fichman and writer/actor Don McKellar to bring
Portuguese novelist José Saramago's unsettling book to the screen.

At McKellar's suggestion, the two flew to the Canary Islands nine years
ago and talked the Nobel Prize-winning author into giving them the film
rights. Saramago stipulated that the movie could not be set in any
recognizable country.

You can see why. The disturbing story not only involves a mysterious
plague but tells a horrific tale of victims quarantined in an asylum for
the mentally ill.

McKellar wrote the script, and, after making a deal with co-producers in
Brazil and Japan, Fichman scored a coup by signing Fernando Meirelles
(The Constant Gardener, City of God) to direct.

The marquee names may be American -- Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo --
but there are also juicy roles for Canadians Susan Coyne, Martha Burns,
Maury Chaykin and McKellar. (Michael Mahonen is also in the film)

The shoot began in Toronto last summer before shifting to South America
after Thanksgiving. By then, Fichman had already made a deal at the 2007
Toronto film festival with Miramax, which grabbed U.S. distribution
rights for $5 million at an early stage./

http://www.thestar.com/article/350765

I'd mentioned a while back that the film will open in the US this August.


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