If your current lockdown watching hasn’t included a gripping period drama, that’s about to change. Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan have teamed up to star in Ammonite, an upcoming indie film detailing the love affair of two 19th-century women searching the English shores for fossils.
The Frances Lee-directed feature has released its first trailer, showing Winslet as Mary Anning, a longtime paleontologist, and Ronan as Charlotte Murchison, a young married woman diagnosed with melancholia. What starts as an informal working relationship between the pair transforms into a captivating beachside romance.
But, as Lee has pointed out the film is “not a biopic” but rather inspired by Anning’s life and his research into same-sex female relationships of the period. “The idea of two women actually in a relationship together was just not a thought anybody ever had within society,” he said.
“I do not believe there is any evidence to back up portraying her as a gay woman,” family member Barbara Anning told the Telegraph.
Watch the trailer below:
The film also chronicles the major scientific discoveries that Winslet’s character made during her life. Anning is credited with making some key scientific discoveries in the Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs off the coast of the English Channel, and her work helped change the way scientists thought about prehistoric life and the way that life on Earth changed over the course of evolution.
She is also credited with discovering the first correctly identified ichthyosaur and two complete Plesiosaurus skeletons — though, she wasn’t fully credited for her work until after her death in 1847.
No official release date has been confirmed.
