Projects matching: Stephen Frears

Synopsis

The true story of an amateur historian (Sally Hawkins) battling skepticism and bureaucracy in a quest to locate the final resting place of King Richard III.
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2022 - Special presentation - World premiere

Synopsis

The tall, handsome Abdul Karim was just twenty-four years old when he arrived in England from Agra to wait at tables during Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. An assistant clerk at Agra Central Jail, he suddenly found himself a personal attendant to the Empress of India herself. Within a year, he was established as a powerful figure at court, becoming the queen's teacher or Munshi, and instructing her in Urdu and Indian affairs. Devastated by the death of John Brown, her Scottish ghillie, the queen had at last found a replacement. But her intense and controversial relationship with the Munshi led to a near revolt in the royal household.
A tender love story between an ordinary Indian and his elderly queen, a relationship that survived the best attempts to destroy it.
Based on the book 'Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closet Confidant' by Shrabani Basu.
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2017 - Special Presentations

Synopsis

Based on the true story of the eponymous New York heiress who obsessively pursued her dream of becoming a great singer. The film celebrates the human spirit, the power of music and the passion of amateurs everywhere.
The voice Florence Foster Jenkins heard in her head was divine, but to the rest of the world it was hilariously awful. At private recitals, her devoted 'husband' and manager, St Clair Bayfield, managed to protect Florence from the truth. But when Florence decided to give her first public concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall, St Clair realised he had perhaps bitten off more than he could chew.
Belfast Film Festival 2016 - World premiere

Synopsis

The true story of the meteoric rise and fall of one of the most celebrated and controversial sportsmen, Lance Armstrong.
Following a gruelling battle with cancer, he returned to his cycling career in 1999 with his sights set firmly on winning the Tour de France. With the help of the infamous Italian physician Michele Ferrari and team director Johan Bruyneel, he developed the most sophisticated doping program in the history of the sport allowing Armstrong and his American teammates to dominate the world of cycling, winning the Tour an unprecedented seven times. However, not everyone believed the fairytale... Sunday Times journalist David Walsh soon began to question whether the ‘world’s greatest athlete’ was ‘clean’.
Toronto International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere

Synopsis

A woman searches for her adult son, who taken away from her decades ago when she was forced to live in a convent.

Synopsis

This is the contemporary tale of a Londoner returning home to the country and to her past. Tamara, once a shy, ugly teenager, has reinvented herself as a smouldering femme fatale. When she returns to her old village to sell her late mother's house, she is barely recognisable to the locals, and to her old flame Andy, and she kick-starts a trail of envy, lust, scandal and gossip wherever she goes. But has she really forgotten who she is and who she loved?

Tamara is the ultimate modern girl; but for all her independence, ambition and sex appeal it's actually the vulnerable, shy fish-out-of-water underneath that make her story funny, moving and very human.

Synopsis

A Brazilian girl comes to live with her cousin in London. He has already carved out a life for himself here; she hopes to do the same. It is 2005, a year in which the city will be traumatised by terrorist attacks. Both of them will be caught in the crossfire.

Synopsis

A tender, raw and surprising story of a small family of Brazilian cousins who move to London to make a living and broaden their horizons, the film stars Selton Mello as Jean Charles de Menezes, with Vanessa Giacomo playing his wide-eyed country-girl cousin Vivian.

Eva Birthistle stars as the woman Jean falls in love with. Dreams, hardship, joie-de-vivre and tragedy are at the heart of Brazuca, which is set against the back-drop of the 2005 London bombings.

Synopsis

Set in the luxurious demi-monde of pre First World War Paris, Chéri is the story of the love affair between the beautiful retired courtesan Léa (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Chéri (Rupert Friend) the son of her old colleague and rival, Madame Peloux (Kathy Bates). Léa has educated the spoilt and callow boy in the ways of love, but after six years Madame Peloux has secretly arranged a marriage between Chéri and Edmée (Felicity Jones), daughter of another rich courtesan. As the inevitable moment of parting approaches, Léa and Chéri try to come to terms with their imminent separation, but the roots of their life of ease and pleasure reach deeper than even they imagine and they begin to understand, too late, how much they mean to one another.

Synopsis

When news of the death of Princess Diana, undoubtedly the most famous woman in the world, breaks upon a shocked and disbelieving British public, Queen Elizabeth II retreats behind the walls of Balmoral Castle with her family, unable to comprehend the public response to the tragedy. For Tony Blair, the popular and newly elected Prime Minister, the people's need for reassurance and support from their leaders is palpable. As the unprecedented outpouring of emotion grows ever stronger, Blair must find a way to reconnect the beloved Queen with the British public. 
 
The Queen draws on scores of interviews with insiders and expert observers for its intimate, revealing and sometimes humorous portrait of a family in crisis and of a new Prime Minister operating at the height of his powers at a time of extraordinary private grief and public sorrow.

Synopsis

Set in pre-World War II London, Mrs Henderson Presents tells the remarkable true-life story of one of England's most prominent and eccentric society figures, Laura Henderson, who founded the historic Windmill Theatre.
 
Driven by the desire to win back the dwindling music hall audiences who had been lured away by the advent of 'talking pictures', this charming lady and veritable force of nature was aided by equally formidable and tenacious theatre manager Vivian Van Damm, as she set about her task with the kind of vigour and determination which belied her advanced years.
 
This wonderfully argumentative pair were complete opposites, but their extraordinary partnership proved fruitful when Mrs Henderson's influence in society enabled her to take advantage of a legal loophole which permitted the theatre to show entirely nude models on stage - provided they didn't move a muscle. From here it was an easy step to the 'Nude Revue,' a musical extravaganza which became a roaring success and cemented the Windmill Theatre's reputation and place in history.

Synopsis

Dirty Pretty Things is an urban thriller in which an African night porter enlists the help of a prostitute, a chambermaid and a mortuary technician to solve a bizarre murder. Set in a world of asylum seekers that lies behind the familiar urban metropolis. It is a tale of two cities, both of them in London.

Pietter Okwe is a doctor who was framed for murder in Libreville and now scrapes a living in London, driving mini-cabs and working as a night-porter in a West End tourist hotel. When he discovers a human heart in one of the hotel rooms he knows that as an illegal alien working without papers he cannot ask too many questions. Okwe struggles with his sense of injustice as evidence emerges that the hotel is being used to remove human organs from third world donors. Finally, with the aid of a Turkish chambermaid, a hooker and a Chinese mortuary technician, he investigates the murder and enforces a bizarre poetic kind of justice. Dirty Pretty Things explores a Dickensian landscape of rag trade sweat shops, hotel kitchens and mini-cab venues in a London that most Londoners never see.