(ANSA) - ROME, OCTOBER 21 - "Stay away from the gulags".
It is the joking recommendation that the wife (Jessie Buckley) of the quiet sales representative Greville Wynne (BenedictCumberbatch) receives on her first trip to Russia for 'business' between the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The woman naturally does not know that her husband was enlisted by the British MI6 and the CIA to make contact with what will prove to be the most important Soviet source during the Cold War, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky (the extraordinary Georgian actor Merab Ninidze).
It is the incredible true story told in The Shadow of Spies by Dominic Cooke, scheduled at the Rome Film Festival in the Everyone's Talking About It section and coming soon with Eagle Pictures.
Cooke, putting the real facts back in line at a fast pace, culminating in the 1963 clash between Kennedy and Khrushchev intending to install Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, above all traces the path of an unexpected and deep friendship that arises between two apparently very different men.
On the one hand there is Oleg Penkovsky, codenamed Hero, a colonel of Soviet military intelligence who, fearing Khrushchev's warrior character could lead to a nuclear catastrophe, decides to start passing information to the West.
On the other, Greville Wynne, a calm and affable businessman, used to moving to Eastern countries, who lends himself to acting as a 'courier' between the colonel, the British agent Dickie Franks (Angus Wright) and the ambitious Emily Donovan of the CIA (RachelBrosnahan).
But there is no shortage of Russian spies in England and the KGB realizes it has to find a mole.
The attempt to get Penkovsky to escape with his family fails and Wynne, arrested, has to face the hardest two years of his life in Russian prisons.
Cumberbatch was very attracted to Wynne's personality, her "sense of humor, her obstinacy and her unexpected strength".
He acted "out of loyalty to his country".
(HANDLE).