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Authorities say they have detained a Chinese filmmaker because he committed a crime but refuse to give any details or allow visitors, his sister said Thursday.

Wu Hao, a Beijing-based documentary filmmaker, has been in police custody in the capital since Feb. 22.

His sister, Wu Na, has demanded his release and an explanation but police have said his case is ``secret.''

She said she went to Beijing's Public Security Bureau on Wednesday and was told he had ``committed a crime'' but officers refused to say anything more.

Wu Hao lived in Boston, New York and California for 12 years before returning to China in 2004 to make documentaries. He had been working on a film on unregistered Christian churches in China before he went missing.

Human rights groups have said that editing equipment and several videotapes were removed from his apartment two days after he disappeared.

Award-winning movie director Deepa Mehta plans to make a film about the notorious case of a shipload of Indians refused entry to Canada nearly 100 years ago, her producer said Thursday.

The film, provisionally titled Exclusion, will tell the story of more than 300 Indians barred from Canada in 1914 after an immigration dispute only for some to be killed in protests on their return.

Mehta and producer David Hamilton are working on the project about the voyage of the Japanese liner the Komagata Maru with the film expected to start shooting next year in Canada, India and possibly Japan.

"We're writing the script now," said Hamilton, in Mumbai for the screening of the pair's last film Water, which will close Mumbai's low-key international film festival.

"It's based on a real event when a boat load of immigrants arrived in Vancouver harbor and were rejected."

On their return to India, passengers were arrested and British colonial officials planned to send them back home to the northern state of Punjab.

Some refused to go and 20 were killed when police opened fire on a demonstration.

Film and tourism executives from both sides of the Irish border welcomed a dozen Bollywood movie producers on Wednesday to persuade them to shoot films here, an Irish Film Board (IFB) spokeswoman said.

The visit is the first since Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern led a cross-border trade delegation to India in January and visited the heartland of the Bollywood industry, the city of Mumbai formerly Bombay.

It has begun to use Ireland in recent years as a location for scenes in its melodramas.

There were only three Indian films that involved Irish locations until an IFB delegation visited the country 18 months before Ahern's delegation.

Since then, parts of a further 11 Indian feature films have been shot here.

One of the most embarrassing episodes for the UK's Foreign Office in recent years is about to become even more embarrassing.

British filmmakers are planning to make a movie for release next year about the exploits of the renegade British ambassador, Craig Murray, with Steve Coogan in the running to play him.

The producer, Michael Winterbottom, who directed The Road to Guantanamo and A Cock and Bull Story, which starred Coogan, has bought the film rights to Murray's Murder in Samarkand, an account of his two years as ambassador to Uzbekistan. The book, which is due out in June, is described by its publisher, Mainstream, as "an incredible true story of espionage, torture, high politics, sex and murder."

Double Oscar-winner Tom Hanks has signed on to play a sacked advertising executive who ends up working in a coffee shop in the film version of How Starbucks Saved My Life, reports said Tuesday.

The Saving Private Ryan and Big actor will star in the movie that will be directed by Good Will Hunting and To Die For filmmaker Gus Van Sant and based on a yet-to-be-written book that Universal Pictures bought up in advance.

Hollywood superstar Nicole Kidman has agreed to take on a secret spying mission.

The Australian-born Oscar winner has signed on to star in and produce a new cloak-and-dagger thriller that is being hailed as a female version of The Bourne Identity, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

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