Freida’s Arabic connection

Freida Pinto, who is currently shooting for Oscar-nominated director Julian Schnabel’s Miral in Jerusalem, had to go through a gruelling two-week-long Arabic language learning course from a personal tutor hired specially for her. DNA has learnt that Freida would be speaking English with an Arabic accent and would also apparently utter dialogues in Arabic for which she insisted on taking the tuitions since she wanted to deliver the best for her first chunky lead role.

Julian has borrowed the idea for Miral from a book written by Rula Jebreal which narrates the story of a character named Hind Husseini and chronicles the protagonist’s effort to set up an orphanage in Jerusalem after Palestine was partitioned in 1948 and Israel was created.

A source close to the film says, “Freida wants to be a perfectionist in her most challenging role so far and when she took up the project she had got to know that she would have to speak in Arabic or speak English like Israelis do. She instantly told Julian that she needed some time to fully prepare herself before the shooting began and reached Jerusalem way ahead of schedule to do research for her role. During this time, she also took Arabic language tuitions for around two weeks. Post this, she went and communicated to Julian that she was ready to roll and now Julian has started shooting the film too.”

When contacted, Freida’s spokesperson confirmed that Freida was indeed in Jerusalem for the shoot.