This is truly fantastic news that Ammonite will be closing the London Film Festival. The first railer for the film was only released yesterday so this is great to know. Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan in a film together is certainly going to be very special to watch!
The BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express is delighted to announce that this year's closing film will be the biopic Ammonite, directed by Francis Lee, starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan and produced by See-Saw Films. The film will receive its UK premiere on Saturday 17 October and will be available to UK audiences at cinemas across UK, who will also enjoy a virtual introduction from Lee and key cast.
In the 1840s, acclaimed self-taught paleontologist Mary Anning (Winslet) works alone on the wild and brutal southern English coastline at 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 (Ronan), 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.
Both a heartfelt love-story and an examination of gender, class and society, Ammonite brings to life in vivid detail the life of a woman unappreciated in her own time. A pioneering paleontologist and passionate fossil collector, Anning's findings contributed to changes in scientific thinking around the prehistory of the Earth and saw her named as one of the most influential women in British scientific history by the Royal Society after her death.