For us local cats in the DMV, today is the start of the Middleburg Film Festival, and once again they’ve brought a slate of likely awards contenders. While the list of movies this year is slim compared to other years due to the pandemic, many of them are virtual which makes checking them out easy. And it doesn’t diminish the quality by any means, because one of the most anticipated movies of the year is there, Francis Lee’s romance drama Ammonite, and a new trailer has arrived just in time.
Starring two of the greatest actresses in the world, Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan, Ammonite follows renowned paleontologist Mary Anning, who has been dismissed by the scientific community and thus takes a job caring for a young woman recovering from a tragedy. It’s during their fossil-hunting excursions that the two women forge a passionate relationship that will change their lives forever.
Also in the cast are Gemma Jones, James McArdle, Fiona Shaw, and Alec Secareanu who worked with Lee on 2017 breakout, God’s Own Country.
Ammonite had its world premiere at TIFF and received strong reviews. The film will open in theaters on November 13th.
SYNOPSIS: In the 1840s, acclaimed self-taught palaeontologist Mary Anning works alone on the wild and brutal Southern English coastline of Lyme Regis. The days of her famed discoveries behind her, she now hunts for common fossils to sell to rich tourists to support herself and her ailing widowed mother. When one such tourist, Roderick Murchison, arrives in Lyme on the first leg of a European tour, he entrusts Mary with the care of his young wife Charlotte, who is recuperating from a personal tragedy. Mary, whose life is a daily struggle on the poverty line, cannot afford to turn him down but, proud and relentlessly passionate about her work, she clashes with her unwanted guest. They are two women from utterly different worlds. Yet despite the chasm between their social spheres and personalities, Mary and Charlotte discover they can each offer what the other has been searching for: the realisation that they are not alone. It is the beginning of a passionate and all-consuming love affair that will defy all social bounds and alter the course of both lives irrevocably.
