Movie co-produced from Liverpool to get Toronto showing
A MOVIE directed by renown film-maker Terence Davies receives its global premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next month.
The film Sunset Song, co-produced by Hurricane Films based at Hope Street in the city, will also receive its European debut at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Starring Agness Deyne and Peter Mullan, Sunset Song is based on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel about a young woman growing up in a dysfunctional farming family in the north east of Scotland before World War I.
It has been shot in Scotland, Luxembourge and New Zealand. It premieres in Toronto on September 13 before moving to San Sebastian.
The movie is a long-term project for Davies, 69, who has taken 15 years to get the production to the big screen following a raft of rejections.
He told the Liverpool Echo last year: “It was very hard. We nearly got it in 2003, and someone from the UK Film Council, after mucking us around for three months, just said ‘it hasn’t got legs’. You shouldn’t say that about any script, it’s very cruel.
“It really was dispiriting, it just seemed that there was one thing after another that could go wrong and did go wrong. There were many, many difficulties.
“But I think we’ve pulled it off, and I say we because I couldn’t have done it without that crew or that cast.
“People were dedicated to it.”
Other producers of the film are Iris Productions’ Nicolas Steil and it was executive produced by SellOutPictures’ Bob Last.
