Casting News for Film Adaptation of Zulu by Caryl Férey

Orlando Bloom ("Pirates of the Caribbean", "The Lord of the Rings") has joined Djimon Hounsou (Gladiator, Blood Diamond) as co-stars in the film adaptation of Caryl Férey's 2008 crime novel Zulu. Jérôme Salle (The Tourist) is set to direct his adapted screenplay, co-written with Julien Rappeneau.

In the book, Ali Neuman — presumably to be played by Hounsou — ran away from home as a child to escape the Inkatha, a militant political party at war with the then-underground African National Congress. He and his mother are the only members of his family that survived the carnage of those years and the psychological scars remain.

Today, Neuman is chief of the homicide branch of the Cape Town police, a job in which he must do battle with South Africa’s two scourges: widespread violence and AIDS. When the mutilated corpse of a young white woman is found in the city’s botanical gardens, Neuman’s job gets even more difficult. He is chasing one false lead after another when a second corpse, again that of a white woman, is found. This time, the body bears signs of a Zulu ritual. A new evil has insinuated itself into this recently integrated city. And a new drug: traces of an unknown narcotic have been found in the blood of both victims. The investigation will take Neuman back to his homeland, where he will discover that the once bloody killing fields have become the ideal no-man’s land for unscrupulous multinationals, and that the apparatchiks of apartheid still lurk in the shadows and the back rooms of a society struggling toward reconciliation.

Among its many literary honors, Zulu won Le Prix Mystère de la Critique for Best French Novel in 2009.

(Related article: AlloCine.com.