[By NICK VIVARELLI, Variety]

Bernardo Bertolucci’s previously announced new pic ”Io e Te” (Me and You) is going forward, with firm plans for a 3D shoot to start by year’s end on the coming-of-age drama about an adolescent boy who hides out in his Rome basement.

Rome-based producer Mario Gianani, who shepherded Marco Bellocchio’s ”Vincere,” will produce ”Io e Te” in tandem with Bertolucci’s own Fiction Cinematografica shingle.

While other production details, including foreign sales, are being kept under wraps, leading Italian distributor Medusa has confirmed it will release ”Io e Te” in Italy.

Casting is still being decided.

Pic will mark Bertolucci’s return to the director’s chair eight years after ”The Dreamers.” It will be his first Italian-language feature film after thirty years, and also his first foray into stereoscopic filmmaking.

Based on a short novel by hot Italian author Niccolo Ammaniti, ”Io e Te” is about a 14-year-old boy named Lorenzo who, having told his parents that he went on a ski trip, hides out in his basement where he unexpectedly comes into close contact with his much older half-sister, Olivia, who has a heroin-addiction problem.

Bertolucci is working on the ”Io e Te” screenplay with Ammaniti and with Umberto Contarello, who most recently co-penned Paolo Sorrentino’s Sean Penn-starrer ”This Must Be The Place.”

Bertolucci told Variety that what he loves about 3D is that ”it’s based on the fact that you look with two eyes; so two cameras imitate that.”

”It’s like having a way of seeing things along with the audience,” he said.

The ”Io e Te” shoot will most likely start in Rome in September.

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