By Etan Vlessing

The Hollywood Reporter

24 actor Anthony Azizi is set to star in Cast Aside the Clouds, an Iran-set romance thriller to shoot in Athens, Greece. 

The indie from director Mary Darling and WestWind Pictures will see Azizi play Farhad Khosrovi, a Tehran bookstore owner whose daughter Utab (Parmiss Sehat) attends a secret university aligned with the Iranian Bahá’í spiritualist faith.

After the bookstore is attacked, a hospitalized Utab meets a young Muslim neurologist, Dr. Sasan Naderi, played by Behtash Fazlali, and they fall for one another. With a romance between a Muslim and a member of the Bahá’í faith opposed by both of their families, their relationship is also tested when Utab learns Sasan has plans to go to Germany and she is arrested, imprisoned and tortured for being a Baha’i.

With Utab facing execution, both families must do all they can to secure her release, before it’s too late. Azizi is a member of the Bahá’í faith, and two of his uncles in real life were executed in Iran for their own Bahá’í ties.

Shirin Youssefian will play Vida, Utab’s mother, in the feature set to start production in late September. Cast Aside the Clouds, financed by the One Planet Group and other private equity funds, is from WestWind Pictures, producer of the classic Canadian sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairies.

The fish-out-of-water comedy, created by Zarqa Nawaz and portraying a community of devout Muslims living in a small prairie town, aired on the CBC network from 2007 to 2012 and internationally in over 80 markets.

20th Century Fox TV picked up the U.S. format rights to the Canadian comedy, but no U.S. version of Little Mosque on the Prairie ever got off the ground.