The Berlin Film Festival kicks off this week, and with it the attendant film market where producers offer up the distribution rights to their movies. Amongst those set out on the virtual market stall is Damascus Cover**, a new spy thriller that features Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the lead{
With Daniel Zelik Berk attached to co-write and direct the film, the plot adapts Howard Kaplan’s 1977 book. **Damascus Cover **is set in 1989 as the Berlin Wall crumbles in Europe. A veteran spy (Rhys Meyers) is sent in undercover to Syria to smuggle a chemical weapons scientist and his family out of Damascus. But the mission quickly turns more dangerous when his partner doesn’t show up, he notices a group following him and uncovers a huge, murderous conspiracy he’ll have to unravel before he becomes its next victim.
“I’m enormously excited about this role,” says Rhys Meyers. “This was a hugely significant time in the conflict in the Middle East, post-Cold War and with the collapse of the Berlin Wall when an amount of spies were redeployed to the Middle East, where the theatre of covert operations would now take precedence.”
Olivia Thirlby, John Hurt, Jürgen Prochnow and Aki Avni are all among the cast and the cameras are set to start rolling this week in Casablanca, Morocco.