Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer team up on new project

Géza Röhrig stars with Matthew Broderick in Shawn Snyder's To Dust Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer have teamed up to produce Shawn Snyder's To Dust, starring Géza Röhrig (Saul in the Oscar-winning Son Of Saul, directed by László Nemes) and Matthew Broderick with cinematography by Xavi Giménez (Brad Anderson's The Machinist starring Christian Bale and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Alejandro Amenábar's Agora with Rachel Weisz, Oscar Isaac, Max Minghella, Michael Lonsdale). Alessandro updated me from South Africa where he is starring with Chris Evans, Haley Bennett, and (Sir) Ben Kingsley in Gideon Raff's The Red Sea Diving Resort.

To Dust co-producer Alessandro Nivola Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

When I spoke with Alessandro last year on his role in Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon, before the film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, he mentioned a top secret project that he and Emily were working on that Géza Röhrig would play a part in.

Anne-Katrin Titze: Your producing career is flourishing?

Alessandro Nivola: Yeah, we're about to grow as a company. We have a film financed that we are going to shoot in September (2016). I can't tell you anything about it to publish except that it stars Géza Röhrig.

AKT: That's wonderful. I did the post-screening discussion with him on the opening night of the Son of Saul theatrical premiere in New York and we did two big feature conversations together.

AN: Oh, great! He is a really unusual and impressive guy. I am really looking forward to it. You'll hear about it soon. We'll have another conversation in a few months and I'll give you a lot more details. We'll all three of us get together at some point. To promote it on the red carpet at Cannes!

AKT: I'll be there.

Co-producer Alessandro Nivola's To Dust logline:

"Shmuel [Géza Röhrig], a Hasidic cantor in upstate NY, distraught by the untimely death of his wife, struggles to find religious solace while secretly obsessing over how her body will decay. As a clandestine partnership develops with Albert [Matthew Broderick], a community college biology professor, the two embark on a darkly comic and increasingly literal undertaking into the underworld."

Synopsis of Gideon Raff's The Red Sea Diving Resort from Alessandro Nivola:

"The movie I am filming in South Africa is called 'The Red Sea Diving Resort'. It's based on a true story about a small group of Mossad agents in 1980 who smuggled thousands of Ethiopian Jewish refugees out of Sudan by posing as Resort hotel managers."

Keep an eye out for more on To Dust and The Red Sea Diving Resort.