Oscar Winner Kevin Macdonald and ‘Leviathan’ Producer Team Up for Pre-Holocaust Doc

Russian producer Alexander Rodnyansky is teaming up with Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald to make a documentary focused on the little known pre-Holocaust refugee crisis that took place in 1938.

“Many people believed that the horrible toll that WWII took on humanity taught us a lesson, [but] unfortunately, it didn’t,” Rodnyansky told The Hollywood Reporter. “Today, when the problems of migration and refugees running away from war and genocide have become one of the most dangerous challenges in the world, it seems to me necessary to talk once again about those terrible events from the relatively recent history of humanity.”

“Today, a lot of politicians and ordinary people, while speaking about these problems, are still using the rhetoric that was in their toolbox on the eve of and during WWII,” he added.

The project will be produced by Rodnyansky’s new company, AR Content, launched earlier this year to focus on films devoted to today’s most urgent issues, directed by leading filmmakers.

Rodnyansky, Macdonald and Rosanne Korenberg will produce the as yet untitled documentary. The director is to be announced later.

Macdonald won the best documentary feature Oscar in 2000 for One Day In September, a film that chronicles a Palestinian terrorist group’s attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich.

Rodnyansky is primarily known as the producer of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Oscar-nominated features Leviathan and Loveless.

His other producer credits include Billy Bob Thornton’s Jayne Mansfield’s Car and Cloud Atlas, directed by Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski.

Among AR Content’s other announced projects is Debriefing the President, based on John Nixon’s nonfiction account of interrogating the Iraqi ruler, to be directed by Oscar-nominated Ziad Doueiri.

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