Jose Padilha teams up with Nick Schenk for TRI-BORDER Political Action Film

Elite Squad director Jose Padilha is teaming up with Gran Torino writer Nick Schenk for a new film called Tri-Border. The film will be a political action film that revolves around the infamous lawless South American zone trisected by Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, where competing crime organizations and law enforcement agencies fight for control. 

The story "centers on a Boston-based DEA agent who is unwillingly sent to Paraguay for having busted the son of an US senator during a drug raid. The script will explore the ins-and-outs of the different crime organizations and law enforcement agencies in the tri-border zone, as the agent strives to understand how the place works in order to capture his ticket back home, a leading drug dealer."

This sounds like it will make for a great intense film. Padilha had this to say in a statement,

The idea is to have a political film hidden inside an action film, a film that can entertain and teach people about the tri-border and the international crime in general... It’s a different reality, in a totally different environment: the frontier of three countries, in which one finds many different players operating, ranging from Italian, Chinese and Serbian mafias, to Bolivian, Colombian and Brazilian drug dealers, including Lebanese smugglers suspected of helping Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as corrupted police and politicians from Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

Schenk talks about the research he's done for the project saying,

How can you write about something like the tri-border area without ever seeing it first hand? I've learned that landlocked Paraguay has a Navy. I've also learned that the Brazilian Federal Police and the Paraguayan Navy commonly exchange gunfire on the river that separates the two countries.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this movie turns out.