A new biopic of writer and activist Pearl S. Buck will find Juliette Binoche playing the Nobel laureate.
Roxanne Messina Captor will direct Binoche in “Pearl,” which will be filmed in Prague, Shanghai, and China’s Zhejiang Province in 2016.
The child of American missionaries in China, Buck spent the first half of her life in Asia. Her most famous book, 1931’s “The Good Earth,” humanized Chinese characters for Western audiences and won the Pulitzer Prize. She won the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.”
Buck wrote dozens of other novels, in addition to many nonfiction works. Despite her parents’ profession, she eventually argued against Christian missionary work in China, criticizing the cultural ignorance and arrogance of preachers she met there. Buck also founded the first international interracial adoption agency at a time when the adoption of mixed-race children was considered undesirable.
Binoche can currently be seen in “Clouds of Sils Maria” and will return to theaters this fall in the Chilean mining drama “The 33.”
Captor’s previous directing credits include “Her Married Lover” and “A Couple of White Chicks at the Hairdresser.”
[via Variety]
