Hopefully at some point it’ll lose the over-used, generic title, but on the positive side, Swedish filmmaker Magnus von Horn is setting up his next project — moving into English language terrain with some premium talent in Jeremy Strong. Variety freshly reports that he’ll next direct the book-to-film project The Passenger — which is actually based on a 1938 novel of the same name by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. This is the project that will be heading to Cannes as one of the ten projects part of the Investor’s Circle. Port au Prince Films’ Jan Krueger and Rosh Khodabakhs, Lava Films’ Mariusz Włodarski are producing. Will von Horn employ similiar tonal style to that of 2024’s The Girl with the Needle?
The book tells the story of Otto Silbermann, a respected German-Jewish business owner living in Berlin who has to leave his wife and flee his home in the immediate aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 as Nazi German soldiers pound on their door in the middle of the night. Silbermann escapes from his home through the back door and travels on several trains within Germany in an attempt to flee the country. Silbermann’s travels bring him to a number of individuals, some of whom are outcasts of the Nazi regime, while others embrace its ideology wholeheartedly. Initially refusing to accept the realities of Jewish persecution in the new Nazi Germany, Silbermann eventually comes to accept the realities of his new life as his attempts to flee are unsuccessful.
Magnus von Horn has been invited to Cannes with all three of his features – this includes 2015’s The Here After and 2020’s Sweat.
