Glover adds producing to resume
By Etan Vlessing

Toronto, September 16th, 2006

Danny Glover prepping his directorial debut "Toussaint"

TORONTO -- Danny Glover, currently prepping his directorial debut "Toussaint," put Africa into the spotlight at the Toronto International Film Festival this week with "Bamako," a drama on which he served as executive producer. The film unspooled as part of Toronto's Vision sidebar.

Glover, as much a social activist as actor these days, said Tuesday that "Bamako" is the latest in a string of films by international directors he's backing that he considers socially relevant as well as commercially viable.

"I want to be supporting directors whose stories take you into the lives of people around the world who have been displaced, who are trying to make sense of what has happened to them and who, as the urban poor, have been pushed into, or out of, cities," Glover said while in Toronto.

In addition to his acting gigs, Glover is finishing pre-production on "Toussaint," an action epic that will star Wesley Snipes, Don Cheadle and Angela Bassett and is based on the 1791-1804 successful slave uprising in Haiti. Production is set to begin in South Africa later this year.

"Bamako," the Mali/USA/France co-production from Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako, is set in the traditional courtyard of an African home where a bar singer and her out-of-work husband are on the verge of ending their marriage.

Alongside that story line is a tribunal in which globalization is put on trial as ordinary Africans testify to the excesses and shortfalls of the World Bank and other international financial institutions.

Glover, working in partnership with producer Joslyn Barnes, has upcoming projects that include Ghanaian helmer John Akomfrah's music-driven comedy "Touti in Harlem," about an African woman who finds her voice in Harlem, and "Tropic of Angels," Kevin McCarey's portrait of a young boy who meets with magic, evil and redemptive love in tropical Puerto Rico.

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