Hot on the heels of the announcement that Peter Weir's The Way Back will premiere at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival, Newmarket Films has acquired the WWII feature, with plans of a January 21st release.  According to Risky Business, The Way Back will screen at the Galaxy Theater Friday night (9/3) following a well-deserved tribute to Weir.

The Way Back is led by Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, Mark Strong, and Saoirse Ronan.  Hit the jump for a synopsis of the memoir upon which the film is based.

The synopis for Slavomir Rawicz's The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom:

the_long_walk_the_true_story_of_a_trek_to_freedom

In 1941, the author and six other fellow prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Yakutsk -- a camp where enduring hunger, cold, untended wounds, untreated illnesses, and avoiding daily executions were everyday feats. Their march -- over thousands of miles by foot -- out of Siberia, through China, the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and over the Himalayas to British India is a remarkable statement about man's desire to be free. [Amazon]

I was unaware of how impressive Weir's filmography was before researching this article -- mea culpa. He's always had a place in my heart as the director of The Truman Show.  More impressively, he has four Oscar nominations as a director (Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander: Far Side of the World), plus one as a writer (Green Card).  So yeah, as I mentioned, the man has more than earned a tribute to his body of work.  Smart move, Newmarket Films.