New Projects

 
Okay, keep the cartwheels modest because while these two project links look legitimate, they’re not exactly going to feature Natalie front and centre.

First up is The Seventh Fire, which is a really interesting sounding documentary that Natalie is producing. She mentions the project here (google translate that sucker!) and below is the synopsis from IMDB.

An Ojibwe community in rural Minnesota is caught between the violent rise of Native American gangs and the struggle for cultural identity. The Seventh Fire is a raw cinematic journey into a rarely seen part of America that reveals the crisis facing American Indian communities across the country.

Next up is a project that sounds like it might have Natalie in front the camera. Let’s start with the IMDB synopsis.

“Based on short stories from Robert Boswell’s collection, seven vignettes explore the difference between fantasy and reality, memory and history, and the joy and agony of the human condition.”

The project is an experiment by James Franco (Natalie’s Your Highness co-star) in which his university students (yeah, he actually teaches…in fact there’s not a lot he doesn’t do these days) get to work with Franco’s established Hollywood friends.

You can read the full write up here, but below is the pertinent section of this curiosity.

Franco is doing these kinds of grad school classes that culminate in patchwork-style features in several schools: He’s adapting Jorge Luis Borges stories at the University of Southern California, unmade Harmony Korine scripts at NYU, and Robert Boswell poems at UCLA with big-name actors like Natalie Portman, Jimmy Kimmel, and Kristen Wiig attached. Franco described the combination of working with established actors and his students as “trippy,” and he admitted he found it bizarre to see the collision of such different worlds. But these projects, he said, keep him excited about film through seeing others get excited, preventing him from being stuck in a “stupid, rarified place.”

Big thanks to Kitten and Belerofonte.