HURT LOCKER Director Kathryn Bigelow to Head Back to the Middle East for HELD BY THE TALIBAN

The front-runner to win this year’s Academy Award for Best Director, Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow has signed on to helm Held by the Taliban, according to Production Weekly’s twitter feed.  The film is based on David Rohde’s series of articles for The New York Times this past October where he reported on his 7-month, 10-day captivity by the Taliban.  Rhodes was kidnapped in Summer 2008 while he was writing a book on the southern region of Afghanistan.  Rhodes and two Afghan colleagues were taken to a tribal region in the northwest region of Pakistan, a region where Osama Bin Laden is thought to be hiding.  Eventually, the three captives staged an escaped and made their way to freedom.  That’s some pretty spectacular drama right there and Bigelow could make another killer movie with this story.

No word yet if this will be Bigelow’s next project or if she’ll go with Triple Frontier, which would re-team her with Mark Boal, writer of The Hurt Locker.  Whatever project Bigelow does next, I can’t want to see it.  And if you haven’t seen The Hurt Locker yet, it came out on DVD and Blu-ray this past Tuesday.  You know what to do.