COMING ATTRACTIONS

The Souvenir Trailer: Tilda Swinton and Her Daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, Appear Onscreen Together for the First Time

The first trailer for The Souvenir has arrived.


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The Souvenir/YouTube

The real-life mother-daughter duo Honor Swinton Byrne and Tilda Swinton play a fictional mother and daughter, based on the director Julie Hogg and her mother, in the first trailer for The Souvenir, released Tuesday.

In the film, which is set in the early 1980s, Swinton Byrne plays Julie, an aspiring filmmaker (based somewhat upon Hogg herself) who, as she says in the trailer, wants to “not live my whole life in this privileged part of the world I come from” and “be really aware about what’s going on around me.” As she falls in love with Anthony (played by Tom Burke), her mother—whose appearance in the trailer for the film is minimal—sees neither the extent of the relationship forming between the two nor the fact that she’s inadvertently funding Anthony’s drug addiction and partying ways.

While Swinton doesn’t appear very often in the trailer, from her few seconds of screen time it’s clear that she plays the role of a protective mother with the type of realism expected from someone working with her real-life daughter.

A second part of the critically acclaimed film has already been announced, titled The Souvenir: Part II, and cast with Robert Pattinson as Julie’s new love interest. Swinton Byrne will remain as the lead.

Swinton Byrne was already tapped as the breakout star of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, where The Souvenir had its world premiere and earned the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize (and was promptly snatched up by indie distributor A24 Films). Since making her first splash into the acting world, the 21-year-old has become an indie-film darling, posing casually on festival red carpets with her mother and costar (while wearing matching shoes) and racking up the praise from critics around the globe for her debut performance in the Martin Scorsese–produced film.

Related: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda’s Daughter, Is Sundance’s Breakout Star