Sex Education discovery Emma Mackey makes a sensational big screen debut as Emily Brontë in this imaginative biopic from writer-director Frances O’Connor (best known for acting in Mansfield Park and Spielberg’s A.I.). Readers have always been fascinated by how the shy, demure Yorkshire preacher’s daughter could have created something as wildly, dangerously romantic as Wuthering Heights. It’s an open question because most of the relatively little that we know about the writer comes filtered through what her sister Charlotte considered appropriate to share.
O’Connor suggests a sibling rivalry at work, and conceives of a secret liaison with a curate, Weightman, in the employ of the sisters’ father, and even a semblance of a love triangle with Emily’s brother, Branwell. That may sound scurrilous, but this serious, well-directed movie doesn’t lack for nuance or sensitivity; it has smart things to say about how a mixture of conviction, self-belief and mortification can feed creativity, and how Emily’s horizons weren’t curtailed by her remote, rural homestead. In fact, these things may have liberated her.
Emma Mackey, Fionn Whitehead, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Alexandra Dowling, Adrian Dunbar, Amelia Gething, Gemma Jones
UK/USA
2022
English
Book Tickets
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
NAZA
NAZA is a codeword euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects will be killed in an airstrike. This chilling documentary exposes the policy and process of state-sanctioned mass killings.
The Sandbox
Borders are the faultlines of the world. Kenya-Jade Pinto's doc examines how modern surveillance technology, bio-metrics and AI are combining to make land and sea borders as impenetrable as air travel, and suggests the unspoken cost is our own humanity.
Atonement
A former Marine suffering from PTSD seeks a meeting with the Iraqi family to which he did great wrong ten years earlier in the Gulf War. Atonement navigates challenging, politically-charged psychological territory with diligence and sensitivity.
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
Slavoj Zizek re-teams with director Sophie Fiennes for another wildly entertaining romp through the crossroads of cinema and philosophy. From The Sound of Music to Titanic, Jaws to The Dark Knight, Zizek offers new ways to understanding Hollywood.
The Pervert's Guide to Cinema
The Pervert's Guide to Cinema takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made (Hitchcock, Lynch, Tarkovsky et al). Serving as guide is Slavoj Zizek, the superstar Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst.
You Had to Be There
In a strange quirk of fate, the legendary Toronto '72 production of the musical comedy Jesus hit Godspell launched a constellation of comedy stars, all unknown at the time but now known to us as Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Victor Garber, et al
Credits
Executive Producer
Robert Patterson, Jo Bamford, Abel Korzeniowski, Tim Haslam, Hugo Grumbar, Peter Touche, Jamie Jessop, Andrea Scarso, Michael Reuter, Sebastian Barker, Oliver Parker
Producer
Piers Tempest, Robert Connolly, David Barron
Screenwriter
Frances O’Connor
Cinematography
Nanu Segal
Editor
Sam Sneade
Production Design
Steve Summersgill
Original Music
Abel Korzeniowski
Director
Frances O'Connor
Frances O’Connor is an Australian-English actress living in London, best known for her roles in the films Mansfield Park and The Importance of Being Earnest, and the TV series Madame Bovary and The Missing, with the latter two earning her Best Actress nominations at the Golden Globes. Her other film credits include Thank God He Met Lizzie, Bedazzled, and the leading role of Monica Swinton in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. O’Connor will be next seen in Sky Drama’s ten-part series, The End. Emily is her directorial feature debut.