/ 26 September 2001

SCREEN TEST FOR HOME-GROWN TALENT IN ETHIOPIA

A HOLLYWOOD firm plans to take 200 Ethiopian farmers from a remote province to Namibia for parts in “Beyond Borders”, a big budget movie starring Angelina Jolie and Kevin Costner, a news magazine said on Monday. Production company Lions Gate International also sent representatives to Ethiopia last week to screen-test 12 indigenous artists to play five characters in the movie, the business weekly Fortune reported. Ethiopia’s catastrophic famine of the 1980s is one of the settings for the film, in which Costner plays an international medical relief worker and Jolie a high-society woman drawn into war-torn and drought-stricken areas in need of humanitarian assistance. Namibia was selected for having a more developed road infrastructure and its proximity to South Africa, which has the necessary support system for the sophisticated and bulky camera equipment and accessories used by Hollywood. – AFP