The Weinstein Co. announced this morning that it would domestically distribute Miral, Schnabel's film about the founding of a Palestinian orphanage in 1948 and the evolution of a young Palestinian woman at the dawn of the first intifada. (Rula Jebreal adapted the screenplay from her own novel, which is partly inspired by true events.)

Schnabel had previously worked with the new Miramax, which released his The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to Oscar acclaim in 2007, but goes back to his roots with this film: Harvey (in a very different time) released Schnabel's directorial debut, Basquiat, in 1996.

With Freida Pinto as the lead, Miral examines the founding of the Dar Al-Tifel Institute orphanage for Palestinian refugees in 1948, and then flashes forward to Pinto's character, who was raised in the orphanage, as a young woman in the early 1990s, when she goes to work in a refugee camp, where she is caught in a quandary between violent and peaceful means of resistance. It's probably the most mainstream film project to take a Palestinian point of view on the genesis and modern aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...