After returning to his Romanian roots for Cristian Mungiu’s upcoming Fjord, Sebastian Stan let slip that he will go full Duolingo mode picking up Spanish for Chilean auteur Felipe Gálvez‘s sophomore feature spy thriller project set to move into production next June. Based on the the recently published novel 38 Londres Street by Philippe Sands, Impunity will traverse the globe filming in London, Chile, and Spain. Gálvez’s debut The Settlers (read review) was a hit on the Croisette in the Un Certain Regard section in 2023. Producers on this project include Rei Pictures, Quiddity, Les Films du Worso, Snowglobe and Volos Films Italia. Mariano Llinás and Antonia Girardi helped adapt the material. Here is the book synopsis:
On the evening of October 16, 1998, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested at a medical clinic in London. After a brutal, seventeen-year reign marked by assassinations, disappearances, and torture—frequently tied to the infamous detention center at the heart of Santiago, Londres 38—Pinochet was being indicted for international crimes and extradition to Spain, opening the door to criminal charges that would follow him to the grave, in 2006.
Three decades earlier, on the evening of December 3, 1962, SS-Commander Walter Rauff was arrested in his home in Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Chile. As the overseer of the development and use of gas vans in World War II, he was indicted for the mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews and faced extradition to West Germany.
Would these uncommon criminals be held accountable? Were their stories connected? The Nuremberg Trials—where Rauff’s crimes had first been read into the record, in 1945—opened the door to universal jurisdiction, and Pinochet’s case would be the first effort to ensnare a former head of state.
In this unique blend of memoir, courtroom drama, and travelogue, Philippe Sands gives us a front row seat to the Pinochet trial—where he acted as a barrister for Human Rights Watch—and teases out the dictator’s unexpected connection to a leading Nazi who ended up managing a king crab cannery in Patagonia. A decade-long journey exposes the chilling truth behind the lives of two men and their intertwined destinies on 38 Londres Street.
