For San Francisco film lovers, we are pleased to present this story from “The Moving Picture.”

A Bulgarian website, News.bg, is saying Ed Harris and Colin Farrell will star in The Way Back, a fact-based story of the escape of soldiers from a Siberian gulag in 1940 which Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show) is directing.

Weir also wrote the script, which is based on several sources, most notably the Slavomir Rawicz book “The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom.” The book is Rawicz’s account of being captured by the Red Army in 1939 and his journey to freedom with other inmates. The group crossed the Siberian arctic, the Gobi desert and the Himalayas, finally settling in Tibet and India.

Harris is coming off the western Appaloosa, which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in, and is currently filming the crime flick Once Fallen. Farrell last starred in the cop-drama Pride and Glory and has five projects eyeing a 2009 release, one of which is the Terry Gilliam film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Weir’s last film was Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, which starred Russell Crowe and opened in 2003.

The site says The Way Back starts shooting in March in Bulgaria for a 2011 release date.

[Thank you for reading SFLuxe.com. This article was published today by The Moving Picture. We hope you enjoyed it!]