Keswick Film Club - After Love

Synopsis

Your programmers saw this one at a weekend of films and loved it, as "Joanna Scanlan gives a superb lead performance, the best of her career so far. She is Mary, a woman who converted to Islam on marrying her husband, Ahmed (Nasser Memarzia). The couple live in Dover and he is a ferry captain, often away overnight or days at a time doing the cross-Channel run. Mary is placidly content with her life, her gently loving marriage and the meticulous practice of her Muslim faith. When Ahmed dies of a heart attack, Mary is almost unbearably dignified in her whiteclad widowhood; but, on going through Ahmed's wallet, a French ID card falls out, showing the photo of a rather elegant blond woman called Genevieve, together with her address in Calais. So Mary makes the terrible cross-Channel ferry journey to see this woman for herself. And do what? Confront her?...

After Love has the agony of a domestic tragedy and the tension of a Hitchcock thriller. Mary herself is the suspense; she is the ticking bomb who could explode at any time. Scanlan shows how she has suffered a triple mortification. Ahmed is dead. So is the Ahmed she knew. And so, perhaps, is Mary herself. She is humiliated and horrified by what she is uncovering on a moment-by-moment basis." – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian.

This is Aleem Khan's first feature film, which got the backing of the BBC and the BFI after he was awarded the Screen International 'Star of Tomorrow' in 2015.