Kathryn Bigelow to Direct Held by the Taliban

Based on a powerful series of New York Times articles by David Rohde, who was kidnapped during a research trip to Afghanistan in 2008, Held by the Taliban has attracted one of the biggest names in Hollywood, The Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow, to direct a film adaptation.

By the time Bigelow gets around to directing this project she could be riding high on a Best Director Oscar win, indeed she is hotly tipped to do so, and returning to the front line would help to establish her as a brave and fearsomely talented director, who has succeeded when so many others have failed in making a truly relevant fiction based on the Iraq War.

You can read Rohde’s articles here, but let me quote the first two paragraphs here:

THE car’s engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage.

Another gunman in the passenger seat turned and stared at us as he gripped his Kalashnikov rifle. No one spoke. I glanced at the bleak landscape outside — reddish soil and black boulders as far as the eye could see — and feared we would be dead within minutes.

It is an exceptional read and while there is nothing more than a Production Weekly tweet to tell us that Bigelow is on board you can imagine the force she will bring to what is a tremendously powerful story.