It's not yet been much seen outside of its home country and the international festival circuit, but the Argentine thriller Carancho** is already set for an American remake, with Crazy Heart's Scott Cooper directing.
The well-received original (it's Argentina's Oscar submission for best foreign language film this year) was directed by Pablo Trapero, starring Ricardo Darin and Martina Gusman. There, as with Cooper's version, the story involves an ambulance-chasing lawyer running a lucrative insurance scam who falls foul of a larger conspiracy and gets emotionally entangled with a troubled emergency room doctor.
Carancho is, depending on what you read, a Bolivian folk-hero who was given the gift of fire by an owl; the being who created everything in the world; or a Mexican term for smart-arse. All of which is irrelevant since the English-language title of Cooper's version will be Vulture.
The new script has been written by Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone and The Town collaborator Aaron Stockard, and the producer is Roy Lee (The Departed). The production company is Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment, and the package will be shopped around the studios in the next few days.
The original Carancho gets some sort of US release in early 2011. No word its arrival in the UK so far, but you can check out the trailer here{