In 2007, a twenty-one-year-old British student named Meredith Kercher was brutally murdered in Perugia, Italy. Suspicions turned almost immediately to her American flatmate, Amanda Knox. The ensuing arrests, trial, and convictions — which involved Knox's Italian boyfriend, a bar owner, and a young drifter originally from Ivory Coast — made for a major international story and occupied immense tabloid space. Michael Winterbottom has used the famous case, changing all the names in the process, as the jumping-off point for his fictionalization of events in The Face of an Angel.