THE SOUVENIR PART II

England in the 1980s. Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), a film student from a good family, has lost her boyfriend Anthony (Tom Burke) to a heroin overdose – the man who claimed to work for the Foreign Office, and whose life becomes a stranger to her in hindsight. She retreats to her parents in the countryside, seeks out the people who knew him, and asks questions no one wants to answer. At the same time, she has to make her graduation film, and it is meant to be about exactly this relationship – against the resistance of her tutors, with a crew that does not understand her vision. “The Souvenir Part II” by Joanna Hogg, United Kingdom 2021, is the story of how a film is made out of grief.

Hogg continues her semi-autobiographical narrative and shifts the weight from the love story to the work itself: the struggle over every shot, the question of who a memory belongs to. Tilda Swinton again plays Julie’s mother Rosalind, alongside her own daughter. It premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes in 2021. “The Souvenir Part II” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2021.

Shown at the 2021 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2021 · Film Archive