DAVID OAKES, JULIAN MORRIS TO LEAD 19TH CENTURY GAY ROMANCE BASED ON LORD BYRON'S ORIENTAL POEM THE GIAOUR SET IN OTTOMAN GREECE

David Oakes will play Hassan Ottoman commander

Gender identity is definitely a very hot topic these days, and Rika Ohara plans to discus it from a 19th century angle! She is currently preparing a movie project based on Lord Byron's famous 1813 poem THE GIAOUR in which harem slave Leila is drowned as an adulteress and her lover the Giaour ("infidel") kills her master Hassan in revenge, and is cursed to become a vampire! 

THE GIAOUR
which has two boys whom we couldn't really adore more even if we tried - David Oakes and Julian Morris in the cast, with the story set during the Ottoman Empire in Greece, will follow  ten year-old Laertes who is saved by Ottoman commander Hassan (David Oakes). Baba the Nubian eunuch puts Laertes in girls' clothes and calls him Leila. Protected by Hassan and Baba,

Julian Morris is to play a character named David

Leila grows to love Hassan but the world judges them master and "harem slave"— which is the story Byron chose to tell in his poem.

In the 200 years since its publication, THE GIAOUR spawned the vampire gothic genre and came to symbolize the lethal conflict between the East and the West as represented by its two male protagonists: one Muslim, the other, Christian – the giaour. Yet Leila, at the centre of all this passion, is entirely silent and strangely bloodless – until we consider a new, queer reading of the poem that unlocks her true identity. Love, blood, karmic retribution –  in THE GIAOUR Leila ceases to be a silent victim of "Oriental" violence against women, and Hassan emerges as a gay Muslim romantic hero. Alex Hassell from The Miniaturist, will play the leader of the Janissaries with Charles Lane as Baba.