Cynthia Erivo to produce and star with Alia Shawkat in Anthony Chen's Drift
Production for Anthony Chen’s (Ilo Ilo, Wet Season) first English feature film, Drift, starring two-time Academy Award Nominee Cynthia Erivo (Harriet) and Alia Shawkat (Being the Ricardos, Search Party) is currently underway in Greece.
Oscar nominated producer Emilie Georges (Call Me By Your Name) and Naima Abed, co-founders and co-CEOs of the production company Paradise City and Oscar winning producer Peter Spears (Nomadland, Call Me By Your Name) of Cor Cordium are producing with Cynthia Erivo & Solome Williams under their Edith’s Daughter banner and with Anthony Chen’s Giraffe Pictures. Konstantinos Kontovrakis and Giorgos Karnavas are serving as co-producers for Heretic.
Susanne Farrell (Dirty God, Hope Street) and Alexander Maksik adapted the screenplay for the big screen from Maksik’s acclaimed novel A Marker to Measure Drift.
Drift follows a young Liberian refugee named Jacqueline (Erivo) who has barely escaped her war-torn country to a Greek island. She offers massages to tourists in exchange for one or two euros to battle her hunger, while her daily struggle for survival keeps the memories that haunt her at bay. She meets an unmoored tour guide (Shawkat) and the two become close as they each find hope in the other.
Says Erivo, “From the moment I read Drift, I was moved by the rare duality of Jacqueline, who both painfully and hopefully represents the depths of the immigrant experience, and specifically the black immigrant experience abroad. Sadly this subject becomes more and more relevant and timely with each day. Too often the experience of immigrants is told through headlines, which don’t encapsulate the individual’s humanity. My hope is this project can show their struggle with the empathy and attention it deserves.”
Georges, Abed, and Spears reunite following the trio’s collaboration on the Academy Award winning film Call Me By Your Name. Drift also marks the third collaboration between Anthony Chen and Georges, who sold his first two films, Caméra d’Or winner Ilo Ilo and Wet Season, through her international sales company Memento International.
The film is a co-production between Paradise City Films (France), Heretic (Greece) and Fortyninesixty (the U.K.), in association with Cor Cordium, Edith’s Daughter and Giraffe Pictures, and is financed by Sunac Culture and Aim Media, Lauran Bromley’s Ages LLC, the UK Global Screen Fund - financed by the UK government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and administered by the BFI, and the Greek Film Center, with additional support from the Creative Europe Media European Program.