Oscar-winning Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci is about to get back behind the camera to make a movie about terrorism, according to reports at the Berlin Film Festival.
The flick will be an adaptation of Bel Canto, a best-selling novel by US writer Ann Patchett.
Set in an unnamed South American country, it is about a group of guerrillas who crash a birthday party for a visiting Japanese industrialist at a politician's home and take the guests hostage.
Like most films made by Bertolucci, who is a leftist, it looks set to have a political bent.
Daily Variety reports that the 65-year-old is currently working on the screenplay.
It says that no one has been cast for the film yet.
The owner of the book's screen rights, Caroline Baron - who produced Capote, the highly acclaimed biopic about Truman Capote that has been nominated for this year's Academy Awards - is working on the project with Jeremy Thomas, the producer of many Bertolucci films.
Bertolucci was born in Parma in 1940, the son of poet Attilio Bertolucci.
A prodigious talent, he was awarded one of Italy's top literary awards, the Premio Viareggio, for a book of poetry before directing his first film at the age of 22, La Commare Secca (The Grim Reaper) - critically acclaimed but a commercial flop.
It was eight years later with The Conformist that his skill as a director really came to the fore. The film earned him his first Oscar nomination, for best non-original screenplay. This was followed in 1972 by Last Tango In Paris, one of the most controversial films in cinema history because of the famous 'butter' sex scene between actors Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider.
The picture, which by today's standards seems fairly tame, is the story of an affair between a beautiful young French woman (Schneider) and an American (Brando) recovering from his wife's suicide.
The film, which won Bertolucci a best director Oscar nomination, was plagued with censorship problems and
triggered unsuccessful obscenity litigation in Italy. A few years later, Bertolucci made 1900, an epic
documenting the rise of Fascism through the lives of two men living in the Italian countryside between 1900 and 1945. But many critics say his masterpiece is The Last Emperor (1987), the sumptuously shot story of China's last monarch, Pu Yi, which snagged nine Academy Awards, including best director.
More recently he gained acclaim for The Dreamers (2003), the tale of a bizarre ménage a' trois set in Paris with the 1968 student revolt as a backdrop.
