Remember when Cate Blanchett argued for more movies about women?

As Blanchett is probably aware, one of the most reliable routes to starring in a film about woman is working with female directors and screenwriters. And so the Blue Jasmine star is doing just that by teaming up with Oscar-winning Danish director Susanne Bier (In a Better World, Love is All You Need) and British screenwriter Moira Buffini (Jane Eyre, Byzantium).

The film will be based on John Preston’s novel The Dig, a fictional account of the 1930–39 Sutton Hoo excavation, which remains the most significant archaeological finding to date about the Anglo Saxons. Blanchett will presumably play amateur archaeologist Edith Pretty, who was the first to intuit that there was something quite remarkable buried in her backyard. Eventually, the dig yielded immeasurably valuable findings, including an entire ship.

Bier has wrapped up shooting on the Jennifer Lawrence historical romance Serena and is currently in post-production on the existential drama A Second Chance, starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as a policeman who finds an abandoned baby.

[h/t The Playlist]