24 Actor Anthony Azizi is set to star in Put the clouds asidea romantic thriller set in Iran, which will be filmed in Athens, Greece.
The independent film from director Mary Darling and WestWind Pictures will see Azizi play Farhad Khosrovi, a Tehran bookstore owner whose daughter Utab (Parmiss Sehat) attends a secret university tied to the Iranian spiritualist Bahá'í faith.
After the attack on the bookstore, Utab, who is hospitalized, meets a young Muslim neurologist, Dr. Sasan Naderi, played by Behtash Fazlali, and they fall in love. With a romance between a Muslim and a member of the Bahá'í faith opposed by both their families, their relationship is tested when Utab learns that Sasan is planning to go to Germany and she is arrested, imprisoned and tortured for being a Bahá'í.
With Utab facing execution, both families must do everything they can to secure his release before it's too late. Azizi is a member of the Bahá'í faith, and two of his real-life uncles were executed in Iran for their Bahá'í connections.
Shirin Youssefian will play Vida, Utab's mother, in the feature film, which will begin production at the end of September. Leave the clouds aside, funded by One Planet Group and other private equity funds, is from WestWind Pictures, producer of the classic Canadian sitcom Small mosque in the prairies.
The fish-out-of-water comedy, created by Zarqa Nawaz and about a community of devout Muslims living in a small prairie town, aired on the CBC network from 2007 to 2012 and internationally in more than 80 markets.
20th Century Fox TV acquired the rights to the U.S. format of the Canadian comedy, but no U.S. version was made. Little Mosque in the Prairie never took off.