Following her stints on “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Mrs. America,” Amma Asante has lined up another television directing job. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the BAFTA-winning filmmaker will helm an adaptation of “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” for the small screen. Based on the 1992 novel “Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow,” the series sees Smilla Jaspersen, a half-Inuit woman in Copenhagen, looking into the death of an immigrant Inuit child and stumbling upon something supernatural.
Smilla’s “search for answers sets her on a journey to her native home of Greenland,” the source teases, “where a mysterious extraterrestrial object hidden deep in the ice and averting evil for millennia is waiting for the right person to unlock its powers.”
The book was previously made into the 1997 feature “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” starring Julia Ormond. The series adaptation, hailing from Constantin Film TV, will soon be shopped to cable networks and streamers.
“I’m absolutely delighted to be helming a show with such a powerful female lead at its center,” Asante said. “[The] novel gave us a potent social commentary, with a heroine ahead of her time, that illuminated themes more relevant today than ever.”
Asante received a BAFTA for her first feature, “A Way of Life.” She has also helmed films “Belle,” “A United Kingdom,” and “Where Hands Touch.” Most recently, she directed the Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan episodes of “Mrs. America,” a miniseries centering the women on both sides of the ERA fight. Up next for Asante is biographical thriller “The Billion Dollar Spy.”
When Women and Hollywood asked Asante what inspired her to pursue filmmaking, she told us, “The work of filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, Julie Dash, and Ken Loach. The writings of James Baldwin, Jane Austen, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison. The fashion design of Coco Chanel and Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen. The film scores of Terence Blanchard, John Williams, and Ennio Morricone. The art of Banksy, and the art of Harlem Renaissance artists such as Augusta Savage.” She added, “Life, the human condition, and humanity.”
