Monica Bellucci to star for new Wajda feature

Monica Bellucci is said to have accepted a role in a new film by Poland’s Oscar-winning director Andrzej Wajda.

According to the Polish news website www.thenews.pl, the star will appear as the famous Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in a biopic of one of Solidarity founders, former president Lech Walesa.

Fallaci interviewed Walesa in Poland in the early 1980s.

Bellucci is to come to Poland for two days to shoot a nine minute-long scene.

According to unconfirmed sources, negotiations are under way with Meryl Streep whom Wajda would like to see in the role of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

In several interviews about his new project, Wajda said his idea is to show how it was possible for an uneducated worker to bring about the collapse of communism.

Critics in Poland and abroad said that Wajda is likely to draw a hagiographic portrait of Lech Walesa.

According to Julian Borger of The Guardian (UK), “Wajda’s film will be scrutinised in particular for its treatment of the most controversial episode in Walesa’s life – his run-ins with the communist secret police when he was an inexperienced union agitator arrested in the aftermath of the bloody suppression of riots in December 1970.”