Shahab Hosseini and Kourosh Ahari re-team for biopic about celebrated Iranian-American inventor Ali Javan

The film will see ‘The Night’ collaborators pair up again to bring Javan’s story to a wider audience

Kourosh Ahari, left, and Shahab Hosseini are once again teaming up on the big screen, this time for a biopic of Iranian-American physicist and inventor, Ali Javan. Getty Images

Iranian actor, Shahab Hosseini and Iranian director Kourosh Ahari are teaming up once more, this time to bring the story of American-Iranian physicist and inventor Ali Javan to the big screen, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The pair, who worked together on last year's critically acclaimed Iranian horror, The Night, garnered attention when the film became the first US-produced film to be released in theatres in Iran since the revolution. It is expected to get a global theatrical release later this year.

Javan, who passed away in 2016, contributed extensively to the fields of quantum physics and spectroscopy throughout his lifetime, but was most celebrated for, along with American physicists William Bennett Jr and Donald R Herriott, for proposing the concept of the gas laser in 1959, which could convert electrical energy to a laser light output.

Javan’s original 1960 helium neon-laser device is currently on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington.

Although already a popular star in his native Iran, it was Hosseini’s trio of wins at international film festivals that found him a wider global audience.

Winning the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival for A Separation, he went on to scoop the Special Best Actor gong at the 2014 Lisboa Film Festival for The Painting Pool, following up in 2016 with a Best Actor win at the Cannes Film Festival for The Salesman.

Ahari will write and direct the biopic which will be executive produced and consulted on by the inventor's daughters, Maia and Lila Javan.

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