Ronaldo, Zidane to star in UN anti-poverty video

GENEVA: Brazil and Milan striker Ronaldo and retired French World Cup star Zinedine Zidane will star in an anti-poverty TV advert made by award winning filmmaker Wim Wenders, a UN agency said on Friday.

The video for the United Nations Development Programme will encourage poeple to join a global campaign to cut poverty by 2015.

"I've filmed gangsters, guardian angels, old Cuban musicians, children, the fifth Beatle, a filmmaker, a trapeze artist, a cowboy, an ex angel and a Vietnam veteran," Wenders said in a trailer.

"Basically I've filmed many people but for the first time I'm filming footballers," added the director of Buena Vista Social Club, Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas." One of Wenders's early German movies, The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty (Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter) in 1971, portrayed a goalkeeper who strangles a cinema cashier after he was sent off in a match.

It will be the third time Ronaldo and Zidane have appeared side by side in a video since they became goodwill ambassadors for the UNDP, which is spearheading the drive for better lives in developing nations.

One person in six in the world lives under the poverty line. Some 50,000 people a day die as a result of poverty, according to the UN.

Filming is due to begin at the end of April in Paris.