Kitty Green The Royal Hotel Julia Garner

Casting News

Hannah and Her Sydney: Julia Garner is First Hiree on Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel”

Published on March 1, 2022

It’ll be Van Diemen’s Land and The Assistant reunion of sorts for Kitty Green this summer as the filmmaker will reteam with actor (and here co-scribe) Oscar Redding and actress Julia Garner on a fourth feature film/ second back to back feature film project. Titled The Royal Hotel, this Australian backed project will begin production this coming summer and we expect a co-lead actress to be attached any minute now that the news has dropped. See-Saw Films’ Emile Sherman, Iain Canning, Liz Watts and Kath Shelper are producing. Simon Gillis will exec produce.

We’ve been fans of Green’s experi-docu beginnings with 2013’s Ukraine Is Not a Brothel, her 2015 short The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul and a whole new take on a communal town psyche in Casting JonBenet (2017). Her Telluride preemed The Assistant was also a Sundance Film Fest selection.

Gist: This follows American backpackers Hannah and her friend Sydney, who resort to a working holiday at the Royal Hotel, a bar in a tiny, male-dominated mining town deep in the Australian Outback. The hotel is notorious for cycling through young female employees every few months, and it isn’t long before they are subjected to mind games and manipulation, trapped in the middle of nowhere, unsure who to trust.

Worth Noting: Green recently directed an episode for the TV series Servant. So did the likes of international talents Julia Ducournau, Isabella Eklöf, Dylan Holmes Williams, Logan George, Celine Held and Carlo Mirabella-Davis.

Related Topics:Emile Sherman, Iain Canning, Julia Garner, Kath Shelper, Kitty Green, Liz Watts, Simon Gillis, The Royal Hotel, top-stories

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).