Fox Searchlight has announced a December 5 release date for Jean-Marc Vallée‘s Wild, the filmmaker’s follow-up to Dallas Buyers Club starring Reese Witherspoon based on the Cheryl Strayed‘s memoir. Here’s the official synopsis:
With the dissolution of her marriage and the death of her mother, Cheryl Strayed has lost all hope. After years of reckless, destructive behavior, she makes a rash decision. With absolutely no experience, driven only by sheer determination, Cheryl hikes more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, alone. Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddens, strengthens, and ultimately heals her.
Obviously we’re talking about an Oscar-friendly release date here and I already have the film and Witherspoon listed among my early Oscar predictions.
In other Oscar-related news, Open Road announced this morning they’d acquired Jon Stewart‘s directorial debut Rosewater based on Mazia Bahari’s “Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival”, centered on a journalist who is detained in Iran for more than 100 days and brutally interrogated in prison.
Here’s the full synopsis:
Rosewater follows the Tehran-born Bahari, a 42-year-old broadcast journalist with Canadian citizenship living in London. In June 2009, Bahari returned to Iran to interview Mir-Hossein Moussavi, who was the prime challenger to controversial incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As Moussavi’s supporters rose up to protest Ahmadinejad’s victory declaration hours before the polls closed on election day, Bahari endured great personal risk by submitting camera footage of the unfolding street riots to the BBC. Bahari was soon arrested by Revolutionary Guard police, led by a man identifying himself only as “Rosewater,” who proceeded to torture and interrogate the journalist over the next 118 days.
In October 2009, with Bahari’s wife leading an international campaign from London to have her husband freed, and Western media outlets including “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart continuing to keep the story alive, Iranian authorities released Bahari on $300,000 bail and the promise he would act as a spy for the government.
No release date was announced, but a Fall 2014 release is expected.
