The financing is in place and Anthony Hopkins and Annette Bening are on board for Andy Garcia in Hemingway & Fuentes. Hopkins will play the Nobel Prize-winning author. Bening will portray Hemingway’s third wife, Mary Walsh Hemingway. Garcia will direct the film and play Gregorio Fuentes, the longtime first mate on Hemingway’s boat. The novelist’s niece Hilary Hemingway and Garcia wrote the screenplay. Shooting is scheduled to start in January 2013. Garcia’s CineSon production company and Edward Walson’s Sunrider Productions will produce. Sundrider provided the financing. The Paradigm Motion Picture Finance Group, who arranged financing, will handle the film’s domestic distribution. Cargo Entertainment will handle foreign sales at the Cannes Film Festival.

Hemingway & Fuentes details the writer’s time in Cuba in the early 1950s and his inspiration for The Old Man And The Sea. The 1952 book was the last new work published by the writer before his death in 1961. It was a best seller, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was mentioned by the Nobel Committee in 1954 as one reason Hemingway was given the prize. Fuentes, who died in 2002 at 104 years old, was one of the novelist’s closest friends during the last decades of his life.

Hopkins, who will soon be seen playing Alfred Hitchcock in Sacha Gervasi’s film about the director and the making of Psycho, is repped by UTA. Bening is repped by CAA. Garcia is repped by Paradigm.

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