Spanish actresses Candela Peña, Veronica Echegui and Blanca Portillo have joined the production of  Bélen Macías's  first feature El patio de mi cárcel (lit. The Patio of My Prison). Shooting on the feature will start on Monday, according to Cine y Tele. The €3 million film will be shot in Madrid and the prison of Guadalajara in the Castile-La Mancha region. Goya-winning actress Peña plays Isa, a petty thief with a tough character who nevertheless has problems adapting to life outside prison. To help her find her way, she becomes part of Módulo 4, a prison theatre group supported by a civil employee of the prison as well as the institution's female director.

Candela Peña has just wrapped the period sex romp S for directors Dunia Ayaso and Félix Sabroso and will move on directly to El patio de mi cárcel. She won the Best Actress Goya, Spain's top acting honours, for her role in Princesas in 2005, in which she played a philosophising prostitute with a heart of gold.

The film will co-star Veronica Echegui, Juani from Bigas Lunas's Yo soy la Juani. The 24-year-old actress can next be seen in the Spanish-Argentine film Tocar il cielo (Touch the Sky), while her co-star in that film, Raúl Arévalo (Azuloscurocasinegro / DarkBlueAlmostBlack), will also play a role in Macías's prison drama.

Arévalo's latest film Siete mesas (de billar francés) (Seven French Billiards Tables) was presented at the recent San Sebastian Film Festival, where it won the Best Actress prize for Blanca Portillo, who will again co-star alongside the talented newcomer in El patio de mi cárcel. Portillo is best known to international audiences for her sombre roles in the swashbuckler Alatriste and Almodóvar's Volver. The cast further includes Ana Wagener, Violeta Pérez, Patricia Reyes and Natalia Mateo.

Shooting is scheduled to last for about eight weeks, with Warner Bros Spain looking at a release date sometime in 2008.

(Photo: Blanca Portillo at the 2006 Karlovy Vary Film Festival for the presentation of Volver. Photo (c): Fabrizio Maltese for european-films.net, all rights reserved.)