Amma Asante made waves with 2013’s Belle, opening doors from Hollywood to (thanks to a new-found friendship with Prince) Paisley Park. Now, as the new issue of Empire reports, she’s back with a new historical romance, A United Kingdom, and a date with a BFI London Film Festival gala. Watch the film’s first trailer below.
Like Belle, it’s a true-life tale of love, prejudice, social conventions and like Belle, it promises heartache as well as uplift. David Oyelowo is Botswana’s president-to-be Seretse Khama and Rosamund Pike plays London office clerk Ruth Williams. The movie charts their unlikely love affair and subsequent efforts to navigate through the opposition of their respective governments. The late '40s setting adds post-war pathos to a story of love in both hot and cold climates.
"I always say that a film doesn't become a film until it meets its audience,” Asante tells Empire. "I'm sitting here on the edge of my seat just waiting to see how audiences react to it and how it touches them, really. If it touches them half as much as Belle touched audiences I'll feel like I'm in a good place."
Lending support are Asante’s lucky charm Tom Felton, Jack Davenport, Mandela’s Terry Pheto, Arnold Oceng (Adulthood) and Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael.
A United Kingdom opens the London Film Festival on 5 October, before making its bow across the UK on 25 November. Pick up the new issue of Empire for much more from Asante on the movie.