Last year Saoirse Ronan earned an Oscar nomination for playing a young Irish immigrant who moves to New York in “Brooklyn,” and now the actress has signed on to portray another protagonist who leaves her home country. Ronan will star in a big screen adaptation of Camilla Gibb’s best-selling 2007 novel “Sweetness in the Belly,” Deadline reports. She’ll play a refugee in the drama.
The story centers on “Lilly Abdal (Ronan), a woman caught between two places: one of her birth parents and the other, where she was adopted, raised, and fell in love,” Deadline summarizes. “Orphaned in Africa as a child, Lilly’s first experience of her parents’ homeland of England is as a refugee, escaping civil war. As lost in this cold new world as her fellow immigrants, Lilly becomes the heart of this disenfranchised community in London, attempting to reunite people with their scattered families. But as her friend Amina discovers, Lilly’s mission isn’t purely altruistic and a passionate lost love affair is revealed between Lilly and Aziz, an idealistic doctor.”
The film is being helmed by Zeresenay “Zee” Berhane Mehari, whose first feature, “Difret,” tackled the kidnapping of child brides in Ethiopia. The drama, exec produced by Angelina Jolie, won the World Cinematic Dramatic Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival as well as the Audience Award in Berlin’s Panorama section.
Laura Phillips (“Murdoch Mysteries”) is penning the script.
The source writes that Sienna Films optioned the novel and developed the screenplay, and Hanway Films “is shopping to buyers in Berlin next month” during the Berlin International Film Festival. Producers on the project include Sienna Films’ Jennifer Kawaja and Julia Sereny, and Parallel Films’ Susan Mullen and Alan Moloney.
“When we were developing the script Saoirse was our dream first choice for Lilly,” said Kawaja and Sereny. “It’s so wonderful to have her on board. We are thrilled to begin to realize the project, especially as the film is even more relevant now then it was when we started this journey.”
While promoting “Brooklyn,” which is set in 1951 and 1952, Ronan was asked about portraying an “independent woman in a time that it wasn’t so fashionable.” “To see a character like her, set in that time and not have it be solely about the men that are in her life, that’s quite feminist in itself,” she responded. “Actually, all the women in this film are very independent and strong. I think feminism couldn’t flourish then as much as it does now. In a way, it’s become sort of unpopular now for us to be treated as equal citizens.”
“Brooklyn” marked Ronan’s second Oscar nomination. She received her first in 2008 for her role in another period drama, “Atonement.” Ronan’s upcoming projects include “The Seagull,” “On Chesil Beach,” and “Lady Bird,” the latter of which is Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut: The “20th Century Women” actress co-helmed 2008’s “Nights and Weekends” with Joe Swanberg.
