It’s been almost a year ‘The Hurt Locker’ director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal won Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay, respectively (and the film took home Best Picture Oscar as well). Until now it was assumed that the pair’s next project was ‘Triple Frontier,’ a big-budget Paramount action-adventure story set in the border zone between Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.

Instead, that project has been pushed to the fall and Bigelow and Boal are now working on a small-scale film based on the true story of a U.S. military black ops mission in the Middle East (there has been some Internet buzz that the film revolves around the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, but that has not been verified).

Production on the $10 million budgeted film will begin early summer, with Boal writing and Bigelow directing. Casting should start in the next few weeks. And although no distributor has been lined up for the film, there’s no problem with money for the duo: Annapurna Pictures, the Los Angeles-based firm headed up by Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle Corp. software billionaire Larry Ellison, is fully funding the project, according to a report in Variety.

“This is an exciting, involving story in the tradition of the best film thrillers,” Ellison told Variety. “That it is fact-based makes it all the more relevant and fascinating for a worldwide audience.”