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British star Keira Knightley has taken over from Helen Mirren as South African director Gavin Hood’s latest leading lady.
Knightley stars in the award-winning Tsotsi director’s new feature film Official Secrets, which will be having its world premiere at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival in Salt Lake City in Utah in two weeks’ time, on February 3.
The film deals with the real-life events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and is based on the book The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War.
Knightley plays a famous whistleblower, British secret service officer Katharine Gun, who leaked a top-secret National Security Agency memo to the press.
The memo exposed details of how the US and the UK spied on UN Security Council members and how they helped push the world into war, even putting forward a plan to blackmail smaller states into voting for invasion.
Described as intense and atmospheric, Sundance’s publicity says Official Secrets “captivates you until the very end and begs the question: What would you do?”
Among its star British cast members are Ralph Fiennes, Indira Varma and Matthew Goode. And there is another South African connection in the credits: Official Secrets was edited by multiple award-winning homegirl Megan Gill.
Hood’s last directorial outing was Eye in the Sky in 2015, in which Mirren played a military officer pursuing terrorists in Kenya, only to get caught up in an international modern warfare drama when a child enters the kill zone.
Hood also directed X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Ender’s Game, both to a mixed response. Despite several screenplay awards for Eye in the Sky, the Joburg-born director and writer remains best known for the 2005 film Tsotsi, which lifted 17 international awards, including an Oscar, and which introduced the world to Presley Chweneyagae and Terry Pheto.
