15/11/2012 - Chapter 2 has announced a media-friendly cast for a film to recount a young surfer’s meeting with famous drug trafficker Pablo Escobar

International star Benicio del Toro (photo - Best Actor in Cannes in 2008 for Che [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and who has just been on set for Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy Picard) and newcomer Josh Hutcherson (Peeta in Hunger Games) are to star in Italian actor Andrea Di Stefano's directorial debut, Paradise Lost. These media-friendly American actors’ participation in the project was revealed by its French production company Chapter 2.

Written by the recent filmmaker, the screenplay is to follow Nick (Josh Hutcherson), a young Irish surfer who thinks that all his dreams have come true when he goes to visit his brother in Colombia. In an idyllic setting of blue lagoons and white sand beaches, he falls madly in love with a young Colombian called Maria. Everything seems perfect until he meets her uncle, a man named Pablo Escobar (Benicio del Toro)…

Born in 1949, Pablo Escobar was a famous Colombian cocaine trafficker who headed the Medellin Cartel. He died in 1993 after a large scale manhunt to find him.

Produced by Dimitri Rassam for Chapter 2, Paradise Lost, whose last 11 weeks of filming are to start next March in Panama, is co-produced by Studio 37 and Pathé (also to handle the film’s distribution in France and international sales).

Chapter 2, who has only recently emerged from the public success of Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière’s comedy Le Prénom [+see also:
trailer
film profile], is in full expansion with the following titles in post-production: Julien Leclercq’s thriller The Informant (with Gilles Lellouche, Tahar Rahim, and Ricardo Scamarcio in the cast), Patrick Mille’s Mauvaise fille (due out in France on December 28), and Nicolas Bary’s The Scapegoat (based on the novel by Daniel Pennac and starring Bérénice Bejo and Raphaël Personnaz).

(Translated from French)