WHO’S IN IT?
Keira Knightley (The Imitation Game), Dominic West (Testament of Youth), Eleanor Tomlinson (Jack the Giant Slayer), Aiysha Hart (Honour), Fiona Shaw (Lizzie), Denise Gough (The Kid), Robert Pugh (Kinky Boots), Rebecca Root (The Danish Girl), Julian Wadham (The Iron Lady), Jake Graf (The Danish Girl), Polina Litvak (film debut), Caroline Boulton (Spirits of the Fall)
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Wash Westmoreland (Still Alice), director, writer; Richard Glatzer (Grief) and Rebecca D. Lenkiewicz (Disobedience), writers; Elizabeth Karlsen (Carol), Pamela Koffler (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), Michel Litvak (Drive), Christine Vachon (Far From Heaven), Gary Michael Walters (Shot Caller) and Stephen Woolley (The Crying Game), producers; Thomas Adès (film debut), composer; Giles Nuttgens (Hell or High Water), cinematographer; Lucia Zucchetti (The Queen), editor
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Knightley) marries successful Parisian writer Henry Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy (West), and is uprooted from her rural French home to the artistic splendours of Paris. She is convinced by her new husband to ghost write for him, and she pens a semi-autobiographical novel about a country girl named Claudine, which soon becomes the toast of the town with Willy receiving full credit as its writer. This causes Colette to fight for creative ownership of the character, as she also manages to revolutionise gender roles and literature itself…
IN ONE SENTENCE, WHY SHOULD YOU BE EXCITED?
Keira Knightley dazzles as the celebrated French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, in a film that celebrates everything that she brought to the world of literature as well as how she radically defied and revolutionised gender expectations in her time period.