Sony Pictures Classics announced today that they have acquired U.S. rights to The Patience Stone. The film, adapted from the award-winning novel of the same name (winner of the 2008 Prix Goncourt), is directed by Atiq Rahimi (Earth and Ashes). The film recently showed at the Toronto International Film Festival and will be released in 2013.
The Patience Stone is Rahimis second fiction feature. The film features a tour de force performance by Golshifteh Farahani who starred in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly, Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken With Plums, and Body of Lies.
The film was produced by Michael Gentile and co-produced by Studio 37, Corniche Pictures and Razor Films. The Patience Stone marks Sony Pictures Classics’ second acquisition with Razor Films this year.
The Patience Stone is a moving and poetic film featuring a powerful and mesmerizing performance by Golshifteh Farahani, who plays a soft-spoken woman in an unnamed, war-torn Middle Eastern country. As war rages around her, her husband lies in a coma and she is forced to send her two children to live with her aunt, she struggles to keep her husband alive. After falling into a relationship with a young soldier, she begins a secret dialogue with her ailing husband as a means of freeing herself.
“Like ‘A Separation’ last year this movie knocks you out on a very human level. Atiq Rahimi tells a fresh story that we’ve never seen before and it is satisfying on all levels. Golshifteh Farahani’s performance is staggering. American audiences will love her and the movie as well. We are so happy to be back with our old friend Jean LaBadie and our new friends, Michael, Roman and Gerhard,” said Sony Pictures Classics.
I am proud and happy that the prestigious company Sony Pictures Classics will distribute my film in the US and that Michael Barker, Tom Bernard and their team share the artistic ambition of ‘The Patience Stone’ in order to fight all forms of intolerance against human values, as we have unfortunately witnessed in certain Muslim Countries recently, said Atiq Rahimi.
