With more coin invested in the film, Michael Radford (most recently directed William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Flawless) is finally receiving the greenlight for his Spanish Civil War comedy. Shooting officially begins on August 31st in Andalusia with Maria Valverde (from Gonzalo López-Gallego‘s thriller El rey de la montaña, and she top-lined The Anarchist’s Wife which played at Sundance) who is, I imagine, a co-lead. La Mula was set to commence shooting exactly the same time over two years ago, but I imagine the budget for the film is perhaps not epic scale Alejandro Amenábar‘s Agora had their initial investors fighting to get this movie made.
Filming in a foreign language is not foreign to Radford, he directed the Italian language money maker Il Postino and he is set to be shooting in Spanish language for La Mula, which is based on the screenplay and book by Juan Eslava Galan. Set in the last three months of the war, “Mule” sees Juan Castro, a muleteer on the Andalusian front, dragooned into the Francoist Falange, who discovers a mule on the battlefield and hides it among his company’s other mules, angling to take it back to his village when the conflict ends.
Variety reports that the U.K. Film Council added close to 2 million dollars to the project which is a co-production between Dublin production house Subotica Ent., Germany’s Integral Film, Radford’s own London-based label, Workhorse Ent., and the Irish Film Board.