In 1980s Britain, a naïve film student puzzles her way through a toxic love affair and a first foray into her craft in The Souvenir, screening at BUFS this Thursday at 7 p.m.

Julie, eager to know more of the world than her privileged upbringing has shown her, enters film school with big plans. However, when she meets and falls for Anthony, a vague and critical aesthete working in the foreign office, she finds herself confronted with more “real life” than she expected.

Acclaimed writer and director Joanna Hogg based the story on her own experiences but withheld the overall narrative from her actors, allowing them to improvise dialogue in order to explore the raw emotion of coming of age.

The result is a haunting portrait. Michael O’Sullivan of The Washington Post captivated the film by describing it as “the lingering impact of Hogg’s eccentric memoir, whose hidden subject seems to be memory itself.”

Nominated for several festival awards and winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema – Dramatic at Sundance in 2019, The Souvenir stars Honor Swinton Byrne as Julie and Swinton-Byrne’s mother, Tilda Swinton, as Julie’s mother.

Tickets for all BUFS shows are available at the Film House in the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre (PAC) on the evening of screenings. General admission is $9.50 or $7 for Film House members, plus tax. Free BUFS memberships are also available on screening nights.

Visit the BUFS web page for this season’s selection, with additional titles being added to the calendar as they are confirmed. Look for the red B that indicates a BUFS-hosted screening.

For more than 40 years, BUFS has been bringing the best in independent and art house cinema to the Niagara region. The society is supported by the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Brock.