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Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) and Taiwanese-Japanese heartthrob Takeshi Kaneshiro, last seen together in blockbuster House of Flying Daggers, will reportedly star in a new martial arts period drama next year.

Zhang, who is filming director Feng Xiaogang's Ye Yan (literally, The Night Banquet) after finishing Memoirs of a Geisha, will start filming the new movie in April next year.

The flick will be directed by Li Shaohung, and Hero action choreographer Tony Ching Siu-tung will be in charge of its martial arts sequences, the paper said.

The story will feature Kaneshiro as a famous ancient Chinese general who dies of his love for Zhang.

A more controversial Asian movie is being shown at a film festival in Britain which starts today with an Indian film that has been blocked by the courts back home and features a Pakistani star who provoked fury for steamy on-screen scenes.

The 11th annual Bite the Mango film festival in the northern English city of Bradford aims to highlight the problems faced by filmmakers and actors in South Asia's prolific cinema industry, which is seen as conservative and politicized.

The opening movie will be Black Friday, directed by 33-year-old Anurag Kashyap, which centers on the 1993 bomb attacks across Mumbai that killed more than 250 people.

An Indian court has blocked its theater release while a legal case is ongoing, but Kashyap believes there is a wider problem of general unease about hard-hitting, factual films dealing with controversial subjects.

Also crossing boundaries a new soccer movie, Goal! aims to succeed where other films about the beautiful game have struggled -- by scoring in the US market.

The first instalment of a US$100-million trilogy goes on general release next week, and what it lacks in star power its makers believe will be more than made up for by rare access to clubs and players to give it unmatched authenticity.

"The resources we have on this film are second to none," said Andy Ansah, a former professional soccer player who advised the makers of Goal!

Critics, however, are far from certain that Goal! will perform in the United States, despite a storyline that sounds like it was written for Hollywood.

Goal! tells a rags-to-riches tale of Santiago Munez, who grows up in poverty in Los Angeles where he plays local football and is spotted by a retired British scout.

The Oscar-winning maker of films such as Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola, is to return to directing after an eight-year break in a big-screen adaptation of a Romanian short story.

Coppola, 66, is set to begin production in Bucharest on Monday on the low-budget Youth Without Youth, based on the novella by Romanian author and intellectual Mircea Eliade, according to an industry magazine.

The director, also famed for films such as The Godfather Part 2, will self-finance the film, that will star actors Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Switzerland's Bruno Ganz and Marcel Iures.

The film tells the story of a professor whose life changes after a dramatic incident during the run-up to World War II that forced him to flee his home as he is pursued through Romania, Switzerland, Malta and India.

"I was excited to discover, in this tale by Eliade, the key themes that I most hope to understand better: time, consciousness and the dreamlike basis of reality," Coppola said in a statement.

The film will be Coppola's first directorial effort since 1997's The Rainmaker, as he has focused in recent years on producing and running his hotel and wine estate in California, complaining that Hollywood only offered him gangster pictures, according to Variety.

British film producer Lord Brabourne, whose film credits include Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and A Passage to India, has died at the age of 80, a spokeswoman said.

He passed away peacefully at his home in Kent, southern Britain, with his wife Countess Mountbatten of Burma and their six children at his side, according to the spokeswoman.

Brabourne began his film career as production manager on such movies as 1956's The Battle of the River Plate. His other films as producer include Sink the Bismarck! and Little Dorrit.

Hollywood sweethearts Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore cemented their two-year romance by tying the knot during a ceremony in front of 100 guests, according to published reports.

Kutcher, 27, and Moore, 42, were reportedly married at a private home.

According to media reports, the wedding guests included Moore's ex-husband, Bruce Willis, and their three daughters, Rumer, 17, Scout, 14, and Tallulah, 11, actors Wilmer Valderrama, Lucy Liu and Soleil Moon Frye; and Frye's husband, Jason Goldberg, who co-produced the MTV television show Punk'd with Kutcher.

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