Mamoudou Athie, star of breakout feature film Patti Cake$, is to star in and produce a feature film set in the Sahara Desert.
Athie, who is also set to star in Jurassic Park: Dominion, has teamed up with Vespucci Group to develop Chighali, a project based in Mauritania, the North African country where he is from. It is based on an audio story, produced by Vespucci, and written by journalist Sahar Zand.
The story follows Sidi, whose first memories including camels, sand storms, scorpions, and sand dunes towering like buildings. Raised in a nomadic tribe on the far edge of the Sahara desert, Sidi doesn’t have a father like the other kids. He dreams of meeting him, even after his mom explains he’s gone away to heaven, a journey from which he won’t return. When Sidi discovers that many years ago a foreign documentary crew had visited the tribe, he sets out on a quest to recover this lost footage and see his father’s face—a journey that takes him far from the only home he has ever known. Along the way, he begins to feel a lifeline connecting him to his father, Chighali, across distance, time, and memory.
