Director Peter Weir’s latest film recounts a dramatic story of WW II Polish POWs escaping a Soviet gulag, and follows their trail from Siberia to the Himalayas.

This month sees the international release of one of the most eagerly awaited movies of the year. Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Master and Commander) is preparing to unveil The Way Back, a World War II epic that chronicles an extraordinary – yet highly controversial - escape story that has been tipped for an Oscar.

Filmed on location in Morocco, Bulgaria and India, the plot follows the plight of Janusz (Jim Sturgess), a young Pole condemned to incarceration in a Soviet Labour camp following the Russian invasion of September 1939. Transported to a frost-bitten Siberian gulag,  he plots an escape with fellow prisoners. Thus begins a formidable  bid for freedom, entailing a 4000-mile-trek over the Himalayas to India.

Controversy comes hot on the heels as the script, written by Weir himself, was based on bestselling book The Long Walk, by the late Slawomir Rawicz.

The author, like thousands of Poles, survived imprisonment in Siberia, and ultimately made it to Persia, where he served with the Allied Army. However, after the author’s death, it was exposed that Rawicz had used the story of another internee, Witold Glinski, for the account of the escape.

Glinski, who now lives in a bungalow in Cornwall with his English wife, was revealed as the true protagonist by longstanding journal Readers Digest. As documents reveal, Rawicz was liberated in the general amnesty that followed Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Colin Farrell and Ed Harris are amongst the supporting actors in the forthcoming film, which will be released in the UK on 26 December, and in the US the following week. (nh)

See trailer