Nick Broomfield Lines Up His Cast for THE CATASTROPHIST

Broomfield lines up cast for his next.

Steve Coogan, Stephen Dorff and Canadian rapper K’naan have all joined the cast of Nick Broomfield’s ‘The Catastrophist,’ reports Variety.

Based on Ronan Bennett’s romance novel, and set against the decolonization of the Belgian Congo in the 1960s, the story centers on James Gillespie, a disillusioned Irish historian turned novelist, who arrives in the Congo on the eve of independence, hoping to reunite with his Italian lover, Ines, an enthusiastic supporter of Patrice Lumumba.

The movie is set to shoot in the busy mining town of Mwanza, in northern Tanzania, because it was considered too risky to film in neighboring Congo. ‘The Catastrophist’ will be the first foreign movie to shoot in the East African nation since 1962, when Howard Hawks and John Wayne shot the jungle epic ‘Hatari!’

An award winning filmmaker, Broomfield is best known for rabble-rousing documentaries like ‘Kurt and Courtney,’ ‘Biggie & Tupac,’ ‘Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer’ and his latest, ‘Sarah Palin: You Betcha!’ The English filmmaker has influenced a number of current documentary filmmakers, including Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and Louis Theroux