The Souvenir: Part II

In the aftermath of her tumultuous relationship with a charismatic and manipulative older man, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) begins to untangle her fraught love for him in making her graduation film, sorting fact from his elaborately constructed fiction. Joanna Hogg’s shimmering story of first love and a young woman’s formative years, The Souvenir: Part II is a portrait of the artist that transcends the halting particulars of everyday life - a singular, alchemic mix of memoir and fantasy.

‘The scenes of Julie making her film were shot digitally because we were almost shooting a documentary of the filming of Part I, so I needed the long takes to capture what I wanted to capture. I quite like the idea of using these different mediums and getting a feeling of that time in the 1980s that I remember so well, when filmmakers were often mixing media. I think particularly of Derek Jarman, who would go from film to digital and back to film again. He might shoot something on Super-8 and blow it up to 35. There was something very creative in the way that people used mediums back then, so I was inspired by that in a way.’

Director Joanna Hogg, from an interview with Jumpcut Online.