The Sea
Independent Distribution and Samson Films announce that Stephen Brown’s The Sea will open in cinemas in September 2013.
The Sea features a stellar cast including Ciarán Hinds, Charlotte Rampling, Natascha McElhone, Rufus Sewell and Sinéad Cusack, and is an adaptation of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by John Banville.
Grieving after the death of his wife, art historian Max Morden (Hinds) returns to the sleepy seaside resort where he spent summers as a child. Max lodges at a boarding house he once frequented, where frosty proprietor Miss Vavasour (Rampling), and eccentric resident Blunden (Karl Johnson), now reside.
Before long - and despite protestations from his daughter Clare (Ruth Bradley) - Max revisits the ghosts of his past. Max's mind returns to an idyllic summer in 1955 when, as a child, he encountered the Grace family. Carlo (Rufus Sewell) and Connie (Natascha McElhone) were unlike any adults he had met before: nonchalant, bohemian and filled with worldly grace and candour.
Young Max (Matthew Dillon) befriends the young Grace twins, Chloe (Missy Keating) and Myles (Padhraig Parkinson), and his fascination for this unconventional clan transforms into intimacy and love. Meanwhile, the children's young nanny Rose (Bonnie Wright), an outsider like Max, regards the Grace's new surrogate with quiet suspicion.
While Max attempts to deal with the loss of his wife, and recalls moments with his departed partner Anna (Sinéad Cusack), he also confronts a distant trauma from the past.
The Sea is a haunting, uplifting, meditation on the human condition - at times elegiac, poetic, and nostalgic. A story of memory, love, loss, regret... and the persistent possibility of rebirth.