THE Middle East past and present is the inspiration for a number of films being promoted at the Cannes Film Festival.

Queen Nefertiti, famed in the ancient world for her outstanding beauty, is to be reincarnated in an ambitious new British feature film. The aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq are the subjects of Imminent Attack, The Devil’s Double and Kilometre Zero.

The Nefertiti project has a budget of £63 million and will be directed by Hugh Hudson 24 years after he received four Oscars for Chariots of Fire. The queen and her husband, the Pharaoh Akhenaten, abandoned the gods and priests of Karnak at Thebes and built the glorious city of Tel al-Amarna to worship the sun god.

The film has yet to be cast, but shooting is due to start early next year along the Nile in Upper Egypt and at the Egyptian Media Production City studios in Cairo, where there is a replica of Tel al-Amarna. It was constructed under the supervision of archaeologists and features about 40 statues of the queen and pharoah.

John Heyman, the film’s British producer, whose string of major films include Chinatown, Marathon Man and The GoBetween, with Julie Christie and Alan Bates, which won the top prize at Cannes in 1971, described the Cairo studio as remarkable. It was larger in scale than anything in America, he said.

Heyman, whose son David produces the Harry Potter films, said that his production would be the first to immortalise Nefertiti on the big screen. “Egypt’s history is greatly ignored by the film industry, besides Cleopatra and The Ten Commandments,” he said, referring to the two Hollywood epics released in the Fifties and Sixties.

He hopes to have a final script by the middle of July. The film-makers are working with British and Arab scholars to ensure accuracy, although relatively little is known about Nefertiti.

The wife of Akhenaten, stepmother of Tutankhamun and perhaps a ruler in her own right after her husband’s death, Nefertiti was rediscovered in 1912 when an exquisite limestone sculpture of her now famous face was unearthed at the royal retreat of Amarna. It dated from 1345BC.

The moment it went on display at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin in 1924, the enigmatic bust with an elongated neck became one of the world’s iconic images. In practising monotheism, and apparently outlawing their subjects’ polytheistic devotion, Nefertiti and Akhenaten threatened Egypt’s priesthood and ensured that they garnered powerful enemies. Their names were later erased from historical records and Nefertiti’s many likenesses were defaced after her death.

Her name, meaning “the beautiful woman has come”, has prompted some scholars to believe that she may have gone to Egypt from a foreign land. Others suggest she was an Egyptian royal by birth. She bore Akhenaten six daughters, two of whom may have died in a plague.

Among the more up-to-date films, Imminent Attack is about the threat posed by Islamic terrorists, and The Devil’s Double is based on the true story of the man forced to be the double of Saddam Hussein’s cruel son.

Kilometre Zero, about a young husband and father who is forced to join Saddam’s army, has been made by Hiner Saleem, an Iraqi Kurd who fled the country as a teenager.

He returned to his homeland to shoot the film and ran into unexpected problems. After a two-week search for a statue of Saddam that would recreate 1980s Iraq, the crew finally found a sculptor willing to make a statue.

The artist began work in a walled garden, only to be spotted by a security agent. His work was confiscated and the sculptor was thrown in jail. His release was secured only after the director explained that it was all for the sake of art.

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