Focus Features has successfully acquired the rights to director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s upcoming biopic thriller drama titled Silent Twins, based on the real-life story of identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons, led by Black Panther‘s Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance (The Long Song), which recently wrapped production in Poland. On top of starring, Wright and Lawrance are also serving as producer and executive producer, respectively.
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“Aga is a visually stunning and fantastically sensitive filmmaker who treats the twins, so harshly judged, as ordinary girls with extraordinary imaginations,” Focus Features President of Production and Acquisitions Kiska Higgs said in a statement. “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.’”
Based on author Marjorie Wallace’s 1986 novel, Silent Twins is set in the 1970s and 1980s where it follows the haunting story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twins from the only Black family in a small town in Wales. 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.
Pick up a copy of the novel here!
The film adaptation is directed by Smoczynska (The Lure) in their English-language debut from a script written by Andrea Seigel, with Madant’s Klaudia Smieja-Rostworowska producing alongside Extreme Emotions’ Ewa Puszczyńska, 42’s Ben Pugh, Joshua Horsfield, Kindred Spirit’s Anita Gou and Alicia van Couvering while 30WEST’s Katie Anderson, Jake Carter and Trevor Groth, Andrea Seigel, Charlie Morrison and Marjorie Wallace are executive producing.
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Silent Twins was co-financed by Kindred Spirit, Polish Film Institute, Moderator Inwestycje and Cofiloisir. Focus Features will handle the film’s U.S. release while Universal Pictures is handling the international disribution.
(Photo Credits: Getty Images)
