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Exclusive: Silence has been golden for Tamara Lawrance who, paired with Wakanda Forever’s Letitia Wright in The Silent Twins, won the best joint lead performance trophy at the recent BIFA awards.

In director Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s picture they portray inseparable twins, Jennifer and June Gibbons, born to Barbadian parents in 1963. They made an unusual pact at an early age to remain speechless except for communicating with each other in an indecipherable dialect of their own design.

It’s a contrast to a TV drama Lawrance will star in next year, in which she plays a character with more than enough to say. She’s referring to the title role in Channel 4 and HBO’s six-part prestige series Get Millie Black, a crime noir thriller set in Kingston, Jamaica and the UK, created by writer Marlon James whose novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won him the 2015 Man Booker prize.

Also out this weekend is a live brodcast of New York’s Metropolitan Opera ’The Hours’ at 133 venues.

Distributors have steered clear of major new releases this weekend ahead of the UK and Ireland December 16 opening of Avatar: The Way Of Water, however there are some notable arthouse titles debuting at the box office.

Cannes premiere The Silent Twins is this weekend’s widest new release, playing in 160 sites for Universal, following Tamara Lawrance and Letitia Wright’s recent British Independent Film Award (Bifa) win for best joint lead performance. The Lure’s Agnieszka Smoczynska directs this Poland-uk co-production, which is Smoczynska’s English-language debut,...

The story of June and Jennifer Gibbons is one of those “strange but true” curiosities. It’s pitched somewhere alongside the Enfield poltergeist and the dancing plague of 1518. The writers – twins born in 1963 – grew up in Haverfordwest, Wales, the daughters of first-generation Barbadian immigrants. From an early age, they refused to speak to anyone but themselves.

There were other ways to communicate with the world – through poems and stories, or when they were older, drugs, sex and acts of petty crime. At 19, they were found guilty of 16 counts of burglary, theft, and arson. The sisters were institutionalised with an indefinite sentence at the infamous Broadmoor psychiatric hospital where they remained for 11 years.

People tend to fixate on the reasons behind the sisters’ selective mutism. But Agnieszka SmoczyÅ.ska’s The Silent Twins, in its own impassioned and lyrical way, asks an entirely different question: is their choice really that hard to comprehend?...

Ahead of the theatrical premiere for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, fans can catch actress Letitia Wright in the upcoming surreal biopic The Silent Twins. Based on the true story of June (Wright) and Jennifer Gibbons (Tamara Lawrance), and adapted to screen from the best-selling book of the same name by investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace, Focus Features has just announced that the film will stream exclusively on Peacock early November.

The Silent Twins is a new film based on the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twin sisters born in 1963 to parents of Caribbean descent, and whose family lived mainly in Wales. Persecuted at school from an early age—primarily due to the color of their skin and idiosyncratic behavior—the twins gradually withdrew from the world, speaking only to each other (in a combination of sped-up English and Bajan Creole that made it difficult for others to understand), duplicating each other’s movements and behavior, and generally remaining non-communicative with others around them.

While their behavior seemed bizarre to observers, the Gibbons sisters fostered a creative life together, often in their shared bedroom, in which they made art, staged plays with handmade dolls and toys, and dreamed up stories and songs. While both of them wrote several works of fiction, only June’s full-length novel, The Pepsi-Cola Addict,...

The Secret Twins, from director Agnieszka Smoczyńska and screenwriter Andrea Seigel, and based on the book by Marjorie Wallace, tells the true story of twin sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons, who retreated into their own imaginations and isolated themselves by only speaking to each other. In a constant battle between being inseparable while also wanting to be independent, the inability of others to understand them eventually led to their institutionalization, as they fought to hold onto their creativity and each other.

A steady flow of specialty films starts this weekend with the return of a key player to cinemas and a broader arthouse slate that will expand steadily into awards season. This is still a weird theatrical landscape but independent distributors and theater owners have agreed for months that there’s no recovery without a brisker pace of new releases

Indie distributors also appreciate that the weekend’s big studio release, The Woman King with Viola Davis, is a classic battle epic, yes, but also a story for adults, and for women. Another wide release, A24’s XXX prequel Pearl, skews young but — it’s still indie.

“I think we are starting to get a full complement of movies to see. Adult movies that are smart and funny,” says one specialty distribution executive. It’s been a long wait. “Patience is a virtue we need to have a lot of. These may not [all] be huge movies,...

Sistas With(out) Voices: Smoczynska Revisits Case Study of Antisocial Twins

Poland’s Agnieszka Smoczynska makes her English language debut with third feature The Silent Twins, based on British journalist Marjorie Wallace’s 1986 expose on June and Jennifer Gibbons, identical Welsh twin girls whose dysfunctional development led to a spate of crime and eventual indefinite incarceration. In a tale where foreignness plays a key part in lack of understanding, since the Gibbons family were of West Indian descent, Smoczynska doesn’t seem entirely inappropriate as a figure removed from either culture.

Based on her previous two films, there are intersecting similarities, such as the fantastical mermaid sisters of her celebrated debut The Lure (2015) and a woman suffering from memory loss struggling to accept the family who’s reclaimed her in 2018’s Fugue (read review).…...

August theatrical releases were a bit sparse, but “Partner Track,” “Lost Ollie” and seven other book-based projects found their way onto streamers last month, including HBO’s “Game of Thrones” prequel series “House of the Dragon.” September has more theatrical releases, but fewer book adaptations to look forward to. Those that are coming out this month have rich history though, especially “The Rings of Power” series that Amazon has based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s books and appendices.

There’s also “The Silent Twins” starring Letitia Wright and Jodhi May as well as Andrew Dominik’s feature film “Blonde” adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’ book about the career of Marilyn Monroe.

Here are six book to screen adaptations coming out in September:

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Official Trailer | Prime Video

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy series faces another imagining,...

After its debut at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, Agnieszka Smoczyńska‘s English-language feature debut, “The Silent Twins,” hits theaters this Friday. But before that, check out Fenn O’Meally‘s short companion piece to the film, “Kiin,” with words by actresses Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrence and June & Jennifer Gibbons.

Read More: ‘The Silent Twins’ Trailer: Letitia Wright & Tamara Lawrence Play Twins With Their Own Language In Cannes Hit This September

Based on Marjorie Wallace‘s 1986 book of the same name, “The Silent Twins” recounts the beguiling true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons.

Continue reading ‘Kiin’: Watch ‘The Silent Films’ Companion Short Film To Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s Cannes Hit at The Playlist.

There is safety and security in make-believe, in playing pretend, where the only things that can hurt are the things let into the mind in the first place. This is where June and Jennifer Gibbons take solace from the real world — a world full of hatred, and misunderstanding, and posturing. In their fiction, and otherwise inventive make-believe, the twins live out a happy life, all under their own control.

Imagination often bucks up against the cold, hard nature of reality, and it’s in this schism that Agnieska Smoczyńska’s “The Silent Twins” grows into something altogether original and meticulously crafted. The Polish director’s latest inventive feature is the story of the Gibbons twins: a true story, more or less, of sisters who struggled with mental health and persevered through writing and storytelling. Though the twins rarely, if ever, intended harm, they were prone to fits of impulsiveness, and in their late adolescence,...

A tale of two sisters and two halves, The Silent Twins, directed by celebrated Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczynska from Andrea Seigel’s adaptation of Marjorie Wallace’s 1986 book of the same name, centers on two real-life identical twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons, their uniquely idiosyncratic, imagination-rich lives, and their life-and personality-altering experiences inside oppressive educational and psychiatric institutions that repeatedly attempted to “rehabilitate” them into fully conforming British citizens. Both a cautionary tale and, in its limited way, a celebration of perseverance against a racist-tinged bureaucratic system that treated Afro-Caribbean immigrants, like the Gibbons family, as lesser than their melanin-challenged peers, The Silent Twins falters, sometimes badly, if not...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

At first, it might seem strange that experimental Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska chose for her third film a social justice drama about a pair of Black British twins and amateur novelists locked up for petty crimes. But the filmmaker’s esoteric style — “The Lure” was a bloody, lesbian take on “The Little Mermaid” — makes more sense once we get to meet June Gibbons (Letitia Wright) and her sister Jennifer (Tamara Lawrence). Identical twins born 10 minutes apart, June and Jennifer invent an entire language only for each other — and are despondent when anyone else tries to invade their fun. Smoczyńska illustrates the eccentric stories they tell each other with stop-motion puppets, musical montages and, in one Andy Warhol-inspired set piece, a deep pool of Pepsi washing ’round a living room.

Where “The Silent Twins” fails, however, is in tying that childlike expressionism to the stark grimness of the Gibbons’ real lives.

Any number of directors could have shot Andrea Seigel’s straightforwardly moving screenplay for “The Silent Twins” and turned out a straightforwardly moving film in the process. It’s hard to imagine any of those movies looking, sounding or feeling quite like the one Agnieszka Smoczyńska has made, however. Based on the desperately sad true story of two intensely connected Black twin sisters failed by Britain’s educational, legal and mental health services in the ’70s and ’80s, this brazen, tear-your-heart-out drama gets the full benefit of the Polish filmmaker’s singular imagination. Layering one wild formal flourish over another — from macabre stop-motion animation to elaborately choreographed musical fantasies — to channel the inner lives of two young women who communicated only with each other, keeping the rest of the world outside their circle, it’s a swing for the fences that sometimes, almost by design, spins out of control.

Whenever that happens,...

Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczynska makes her English-language debut with The Silent Twins, the strange and remarkable story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twin sisters who only communicated with each other from 8 to later-teen years when drugs and drinking led to petty theft and an arson charge that landed them in the tightly secured medical ward of Broadmoor for 11 years before being released in the 1980s. Creating their own puppetry and dolls, poems and music, which they only broadcast for each other on a fake radio program, the “twinnies” as they were called by family fell into an odd void that became more pronounced, even when they were forced to go to separate schools at one point. And they carried on this way until becoming young women landing and in legal trouble until incredibly being incarcerated for over a decade, five or six times as long as the...

Agnieszka Smoczyńska directs this well-acted, disturbing drama about June and Jennifer Gibbons, whose shared isolation ended in criminal acts

Here is a really heartfelt, absorbing new film telling the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons: the “silent twins”, young women of colour who grew up in Haverfordwest in Wales communicating with no one but each other. They were effectively abandoned by the school and care systems but wrote reams of intensely imaginative poems and stories, with June even self-publishing a novel. It gained them a reputation as authentic outsider artists when, in 1981, the twins were committed to Broadmoor hospital for arson and theft. Their case was taken by investigative journalist and mental health campaigner Marjorie Wallace.

Their story has had a number of stage and screen treatments, and now screenwriter Andrea Seigel has adapted Wallace’s book about the case and Polish film-maker Agnieszka Smoczyńska directs in this UK-Polish co-production.

Agnieszka Smoczyńska directs this well-acted, disturbing drama about June and Jennifer Gibbons, whose shared isolation ended in criminal acts

Here is a really heartfelt, absorbing new film telling the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons: the “silent twins”, young women of colour who grew up in Haverfordwest in Wales communicating with no one but each other. They were effectively abandoned by the school and care systems but wrote reams of intensely imaginative poems and stories, with June even self-publishing a novel. It gained them a reputation as authentic outsider artists when, in 1981, the twins were committed to Broadmoor hospital for arson and theft. Their case was taken by investigative journalist and mental health campaigner Marjorie Wallace.

Their story has had a number of stage and screen treatments, and now screenwriter Andrea Seigel has adapted Wallace’s book about the case and Polish film-maker Agnieszka Smoczyńska directs in this UK-Polish co-production.

Anita Gou’s producing career focuses on helping filmmakers and creatives bring their personal passions and visions to the screen. With Focus Features’ Cannes Un Certain Regard entry “The Silent Twins” from director Agniezska Smoczynska, her streak producing singular visions — such as Lula Wang’s “The Farewell” and “Honeyboy,” the collaboration of writer-actor Shia LeBeouf and Alma Har’el — continues.

She started in the business right out of school getting her feet wet in post-production on bigger studio films.

“I kind of quickly realized through that experience — though very fruitful and eye-opening — that my passion was really about more independently driven films, more idiosyncratic storytelling, storytellers and stories. So I quickly navigated how to find my way to towards the kind of filmmakers I want to be working with.”

“The Silent Twins” tells the story of two Black women, June and Jennifer Gibbons, who, growing up in 1970s Wales, only communicated with each other,...

London, Sept 30: 'The X Factor' is rated the most popular television series in Britain, but experts have accused the show of risking mental illness among some of its contestants.

Distinguished mental health campaigner Marjorie Wallace has said that the talent show created by music mogul Simon Cowell is "playing fast and loose with people's minds"

"It is like 'conditioning experiments' that took place in the Sixties on animals to see what combination of reward and punishment would drive them crazy," Wallace, the chief executive of mental health charity Sane, told the Telegraph.

"These reality programmes.

Mental health charities say disclosure will have huge impact after Catherine Zeta-Jones checks into clinic for five days

No amount of PR spend could have brought Catherine Zeta-Jones the fund of sympathy and goodwill she has received after announcing she was being treated for bipolar disorder. Mental health charities congratulated her on her courage in speaking up, and even the red-top tabloids treated her with dignity.

It's only eight years since the Sun's front page screamed, "Bonkers Bruno locked up", after the former boxer Frank Bruno suffered a breakdown and was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. On Thursday the tone reserved for reporting Zeta-Jones's illness was very different: "Bipolar Zeta in clinic five days – star's depression after Michael's cancer fight," said a much more muted Sun.

Zeta-Jones, 41, came to prominence 20 years ago in the bucolic TV comedy about the Larkin family, The Darling Buds of May. Born in Swansea...

'I Suppose I am his mistress. It's wonderful, isn't it?"

So said Britain's Marjorie Wal-lace, speaking about her relationship with The Earl of Snowdon. (I know - you thought it was Madonna, fessing up on A-Rod.)

The Earl was not amused by his former lover's candor. Snowdon, ex-husband of the late Princess Margaret (Queen Elizabeth's sister), is the subject of a juicy new biography by Anne de Courcy. He cooperated with the author and spoke freely. Too late he realized he had been too freely. We told you a couple of...