A film about a group of housewives who go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes is being touted as the next Calendar Girls.
Hollywood stars Claire Danes and Kathy Bates will join British actresses Brenda
Blethyn and Dame Maggie Smith in Pushers Needed.
Details of the film were announced at the Cannes Film Festival today and producers said it would be "Calendar Girls meets The Full Monty".
They believe it will replicate the success of the two feelgood films which became box office hits around the world.
Pushers Needed tells the story of a group of harried, working-class housewives from Ireland who win a trip to Lourdes.
Leaving their children in the care of their husbands, they set off on the pilgrimage which ends up changing their lives.
The Irish/UK co-production will be set in Dublin and Lourdes and filming begins in July.
While Calendar Girls featured a cast made up entirely of British actresses, Pushers Needed has the added kudos of Hollywood names.
Danes, 25, starred in Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo di Caprio while Bates is best known for her role in Stephen King horror Misery.
The line-up of British actresses will include Blethyn, who won a Bafta for her performance in Secrets and Lies, and Smith, most recently seen playing
Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies.
Also announced in Cannes today was a new film from veteran Irish director Neil
Jordan.
Set in the 1960s and 1970s, Breakfast on Pluto is a black comedy about a young transvestite.
The product of an affair between a parish priest and his housekeeper, he is abandoned as a baby and taken in by foster parents in small-town Ireland but
escapes and becomes a transvestite performer in London.
The film is based on the Booker-shortlisted novel by Patrick McCabe and
features rising star Cillian Murphy in the title role.
The subject matter has echoes of Jordan's early film The Crying Game and is a companion piece to The Butcher Boy, also based on a McCabe novel.
