Gabriel Byrne, Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow, Roy Dupuis and Susan Sarandon have signed on as leads in "Emotional Arithmetic" based on the novel by Matt Cohen reports Production Weekly.

Directed by Paolo Barzman and adapted by Jefferson Lewis and Barzman, the film probes the intricate possibilities of love and madness and the shadows the past throws upon the present. Three people who formed a life-long bond in a concentration camp are re-united for the first time forty years later in the bucolic setting of a renovated farm.

Sarandon will play Melanie Lansing Winters, a beautiful woman in her 50's who balances her precarious emotional state with an innate sharp, deprecating wit. Byrne will play Christopher Lewis, a British novelist haunted by the survivor's eternal question - "Why was I saved?".

Von Sydow will play Jakob Bronski, a heroic dissident and veteran of a Soviet psychiatric hospital; who loses and saves his family twice and David Winter, (Plummer) Melanie's husband, whose compulsive infidelity has left him with a marriage in tatters and an embittered son (Dupuis).

On a balmy summer evening, the past explodes into the present in an unexpected and tender love story and its fatal consequences. The 'emotional arithmetic' of the title refers to the characters' struggle to face the past and move on.

The project begins production next month in Quebec.