24/04/2014 - Dutch director Sacha Polak will direct Eileen Atkins’ adaptation of her own play about Virginia Woolf and her lover, Vita Sackville-West

Young Dutch director Sacha Polak, whose debut feature, Hemel [+see also:
trailer
interview: Sacha Polak
film profile], was the breakout hit at the 2012 Berlinale Forum, will make her English-language debut with her third feature, Vita and Virginia.

The film is based on the eponymous play by English actress Eileen Atkins, who has adapted it from Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s correspondence, and who has also written the screenplay for this feature adaptation.

Interestingly, Atkins, who played Virginia Woolf in both her own stage version of Vita and Virginia and in the play A Room of Her Own, also wrote the screenplay for the 1997 film adaptation of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which starred Vanessa Redgrave (the original Vita) in the title role and which was directed by another female Dutch filmmaker, Marleen Gorris, who made Mrs Dalloway right after her Oscar-winning feature Antonia’s Line.

Vita and Virginia, which examines the passionate love affair the couple maintained over 20 years, will be produced by UK-based Mirror Productions and Bill Shepherd Productions. It is currently at the casting stage.

Polak is also in post-production with her second fiction feature, Zurich (working title: Luna), a Dutch-language road-trip film that stars singer Wende Snijders in the lead as well as Barry Atsma.

Her autobiographical, made-for-TV documentary New Boobs, about whether or not she should have a preventive mastectomy, was a hit with critics in the Netherlands when it aired last autumn.