It’s not often that a major film with big stars goes completely under the radar, but today such an event has occurred. During the summer we reported that Ben Kingsley, Stellan Skarsgård, Tom Payne, and Olivier Martinez all linked up for The Physician, an adaptation of Noah Gordon‘s medieval novel that Philipp Stölzl (Young Goethe in Love and the in limbo The Expatriate) would direct.
Here we are a half-a-year later and the first teaser trailer has landed for the German film. While there are no subtitles, only a few actual lines are spoken, so it won’t hamper the experience. Following a young man who attempts to find secrets behind illness in a medieval religion-dominated world, the only thing we can glean from this one is its surprisingly epic nature and seemingly more money put into it than we would have imagined. As we await distribution news, check it out below.
When nine-year-old Rob Cole felt the life force slipping from his mother’s hand he could not foresee that this terrifying awareness of impending death was a gift that would lead him from the familiar life of 11th-century London to small villages throughout England and finally to the medical school at Ispahan. Though apprenticed to an itinerant barber surgeon, it is the dazzling surgery of a Jewish physician trained by the legendary Persian physician Avicenna that inspires him to accept his gift and to commit his life to healing by studying at Avicenna’s school. Despite the ban on Christian students, Rob goes there, disguising himself as a Jew to gain admission. Gordon has written an adventurous and inspiring tale of a quest for medical knowledge pursued in a violent world full of superstition and prejudice.
The Physician is expected to hit theaters in 2013.