Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Shutterstock
Michael Haneke is to reunite with Amour stars Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant for a film that will have the migration crisis in Europe as a backdrop.
According to French press reports, the film is to be called Happy End and Haneke will start shooting it early next year in Calais, with some suggesting it could be premiered at Cannes in 2017.
Haneke was set to film the long-gestating Flashmob, about disparate online personalities, but the project was abandoned last June.
While his new project is set in Calais and the refugee crisis will be “mentioned” and “integrated”, producers have stressed that it will not be the subject of the plot, which is otherwise shrouded in secrecy.
In September, Haneke was part of a group of 3,000 members of the European film industry who signed a pro-asylum petition, which called for immediate action in the current migration situation.
It will be the Austrian director’s third film with Huppert after The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and his most recent film, Amour. Huppert next appears in Paul Verhoeven’s psychological thriller Elle and in the movie Souvenir, about a faded Eurovision song contest winner who works in a pâté factory.
