Gael García Bernal
Mexican actor Gael García Bernal is joining the cast of Pablo Larraín film “Neruda.” REUTERS

In a movie that will follow Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s life from 1946 to 1948, director Pablo Larraín is teaming up with actors Gael García Bernal and Luis Gnecco. “Neruda” will feature a period in the poet’s life where he joined the Communist Party, later became a senator who was against the imprisonment of striking miners, for which he was threatened with arrest and became a fugitive. The film will be a follow up to Larraín’s Berlin Grand Jury Prize winner “The Club.”

García Bernal will play Neruda’s nemesis at the time, Inspector Oscar Peluchoneau who arranged the manhunt after the poet who will be portrayed by Gnecco. Other members of the cast will include Pablo Derqui, Mercedes Morán and Alfredo Castro, following a script penned by Chilean writer Guillermo Calderón. Producers told Variety the film will be nothing like other biographical films, but will mix “film noir, some deep meaning and fun,” says producer Danner from Funny Balloons. In addition, Producer Juan de Diós Larrain (from Fábula Producciones) says the film focuses on a turning point in the Nobel prize winner’s life where he defined who he was as a human being and “where he stands for the rest of his life.”

This marks the second occasion on which Pablo Larraín and Juan de Diós will be teaming up with García Bernal. The first one was on the Oscar-nominated film “No,” which is based on the unpublished play “El Plebiscito,” where the Mexican actor played an in-demand advertising man working in Chile in the late 1980s. Production for “Neruda” is set to start this upcoming June.

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