By “Saltburn” star Barry Keoghan is set to lead “Amo Saddam,” a new film about the final days of Saddam Hussein from “Chernobyl” director Johan Renck.
The film is an adaptation of Will Bardenwerper’s best-selling book “The Prisoner in His Palace”. Keoghan will play an American soldier tasked with guarding the ousted dictator in the months before his trial for crimes against humanity and eventual execution.
Darby Kealey adapted the book for the screen which follows how the soldier grows close to Saddam, sharing the stale air of a bombed-out palace turned high-security prison whilst navigating the fine line separating fact and fiction.
The film will “attempt to reckon with the American imperial machine that has come to define the 21st century” says Renck, speaking about the film with THR.
He adds that the plan is for an “immersive, authentic” portrayal of Baghdad in 2006 without any “typical tropes of a war movie… it’s a prison movie, it’s a war movie and it’s kind of a horror movie almost – there’s a little bit of genre-bending going on.”
The role of Saddam has not yet been cast, but Renck is seeing a “really good actor from the region, who speaks Arabic and can authentically embody the role.”
Renck and Michael Parets will produce and filming aims to begin this Fall.
Source: THR
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