With production wrapped, Shadow and Act has learned that Focus Features has acquired the upcoming feature Silent Twins, starring Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance.
The film is written by Andrea Seigel and based on the real-life book on the Gibbons twins, The Silent Twins, by Marjorie Wallace. It will be the English language debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska
The description: SILENT TWINS is the haunting story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twins from the only Black family in a small town in Wales in the 1970s and 80s. Feeling isolated from that unwelcoming community, the pair turn inward and reject communication with everyone but each other, retreating into their own fantasy world of artistic inspiration and adolescent desires. After a spree of vandalism inspired by an American boy they both idolize, the girls, now teenagers, are summarily sentenced to Broadmoor, an infamous psychiatric hospital, where they face the choice to separate and survive or die together.
“Aga is a visually stunning and fantastically sensitive filmmaker who treats the twins, so harshly judged, as ordinary girls with extraordinary imaginations,” said Focus Features President of Production and Acquisitions, Kiska Higgs. “She’s created a luminous, magical world for her stars, in which they explore the themes of love, longing, identity and what it truly means to have an ‘other half.’”
The film was shot in Poland and recently wrapped production there. It is produced byMadant’s Klaudia Smieja-Rostworowska, Extreme Emotions’ Ewa Puszczyńska, 42’s Ben Pugh, Joshua Horsfield, Kindred Spirit’s Anita Gou, Alicia van Couvering and Letitia Wright. It was financed by Kindred Spirit and co-financed by the Polish Film Institute, Moderator Inwestycje and Cofiloisir. Executive Producers include Tamara Lawrance; 30WEST’s Katie Anderson, Jake Carter and Trevor Groth; Andrea Seigel; Charlie Morrison; and Marjorie Wallace.