America isn’t the only country for which September 11 has painful significance. On September 11, 1973 a coup was launched against the regime of Salvador Allende by General Pinochet, plunging the country into violent upheaval that’s being depicted in Emma Watson’s new film, Colonia. Mikael Nyqvist, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’s Mikael Blomkvist, has signed on and the two can be seen in action in this first-look still from the film. **Colonia **follows Costa-Gavras’s **Missing **(1982) in charting the brutal aftermath of the Pinochet-led coup. That film had Jack Lemmon trying to get to the bottom of his son’s disappearance; this one sees Emma Watson’s Lena doing likewise when her partner, Daniel (Daniel Brühl) is abducted by the secret police. Lena tracks him down to Colonia Dignidad, an anti-communist sect run by Nyqvist’s lay preacher Paul Schäfer. There she joins the cult to find Daniel. Judging by this picture, things don’t run exactly smoothly for her at Schäfer’s sinister hands.
The film has been shooting in Luxembourg, with Germany and South America also on the production schedule. Looks like another canny and challenging pick from Watson that would have given her plenty to chat with Chilean director Alejandro Amenábar about on the set of her next film, **Regression.
Florian Gallenberger is behind the camera on this one. The German director’s last film, City Of War: The Story Of John Rab****e, dealt with another brutal period of 20th century history. This one is scheduled for release in October 2015.