With God’s Own Country, Yorkshire filmmaker Francis Lee delivered a film that was both an extraordinary gay romance, and something far more than that. Rugged and raw and gorgeous and tender, it announced an incredible new voice in British cinema – and now Lee is back with Ammonite, another film that finds a same-sex pairing falling for each other against a backdrop of unforgiving natural landscapes. Based loosely on the life of real-life palaeontologist Mary Anning, it stars Kate Winslet as the famous fossil hunter, telling a very possible version of her story in which she works and strikes up a relationship with Saoirse Ronan’s Charlotte Murchison. Watch the first trailer here.
It looks like another heart-stopping film from Lee, capturing the stunning landscapes of the Southern coastline and the growing bond between Anning and Murchison, with aching performances from Winslet and Ronan. Like Lee’s previous film, Ammonite looks set to take in notions of sexuality, power, and class. “The image of [Anning] struck me very strongly,” Lee told Empire earlier this year. “Totally working-class woman, born on the bones of her arse, yet somehow she managed to rise to be the leading palaeontologist of the century.”
Ammonite is set for a 13 November release in the US – and is expected to hit UK cinemas in 2021, though an exact date is not yet confirmed. Stay tuned for more details of its arrival on these shores.