Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2018: #40. Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir: Part I

The Souvenir: Part 1

British director Joanna Hogg has remained one of the UK’s most underrated auteur assets since breaking out of television in the late 2000s with Unrelated (2008), which starred a young Tom Hiddleston—until 2018, that is. An early acolyte of Derek Jarman’s (Tilda Swinton appeared in Hogg’s 1988 graduation piece, Caprice), Hogg continued to collaborate with Hiddleston on her next two films, 2010’s Archipelago and 2013’s Exhibition (which competed at the Locarno Film Festival). But her long-gestating fourth feature, which is planned to be split up into two distinct parts, will be produced by Martin Scorsese and will star Robert Pattinson. The Souvenir: Part I is a romantic thriller set in the 1980s, with Ariane Labed (the Greek Weird Wave alum, who starred in ALPS and Attenberg) as a film student who becomes with a complicated man. Writer-director Richard Ayoade (of 2009’s Submarine and 2013’s The Double) also stars.

Release Date/Prediction: The presence of Robert Pattinson immediately put Hogg and her project on an elevated platform. With Part I in post-production (the second chapter is supposed to film over Summer 2018), we expect the presence of the actor to make this a potential Cannes contender (David Michod’s The Rover landed out-of-competition in 2014, and in 2017 the Safdie Bros.’ Good Time landed a comp slot), and could potentially make Pattinson a leitmotif of the 2018 edition should Claire Denis and the Zellner Bros. (post Sundance, international preem status) also receive invites.