“Exhibition” writer-director Joanna Hogg has a new project in the works. The British filmmaker will helm “The Souvenir,” a romantic mystery executive-produced by Sikelia Productions’ Martin Scorsese and Emma Tillinger Koskoff. ScreenDaily reports that the two-part movie will span the decade of the ’80s. Word of the project broke at Cannes.
Set to shoot this summer, “The Souvenir” centers on a young female film student who “tries to disentangle fact from fiction in a relationship with a complicated and untrustworthy man,” the source summarizes. The protagonist hasn’t been cast yet, but Tom Burke (“Only God Forgives”) will play her boyfriend, and Robert Pattinson (“Twilight”) has signed on to play the male lead in the second installment of the film, which will shoot in summer 2018.
The project was developed with the BFI and received backing from BBC Films.
ScreenDaily writes that “The Souvenir” is expected to be “art-house filmmaker Hogg’s most commercial prospect to date.” Her last feature, 2013’s “Exhibition,” centers on a couple who both work as contemporary artists. Her other credits include “Archipelago” and “Unrelated.” It was the former that caught Scorsese’s eye. He told Screen, “The film came my way by chance. I was in London shooting ‘Hugo’ and someone sent me a DVD of ‘Archipelago.’ I remember looking at the film on the weekend and being very surprised by it. It was a stunning experience for me,” he emphasized. “I found it moving and beautiful. I then met Joanna in London.”
Hogg explained, “This story has been in my head for a few years. After ‘Exhibition,’ I talked to Martin about what I should do next. I had two ideas: one was a ghost story. The other was this one.” She revealed, “I start from autobiography. When I investigate a story I realize what I don’t remember and the demands of fiction take over: that’s the fun part. Reality and fiction are so jumbled up. That blurring is partly what I’m exploring in this story.”
In 2015 Hogg co-curated a retrospective of Chantal Akerman’s work. Check out a tribute she co-wrote for the late pioneering filmmaker — who she says “changed what cinema is or could be or ought to be” — over at The Guardian.
