Edinburgh, 1810. Teachers Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods embark on their dream of an independent life together and open a boarding school. Their lives are changed forever when a wealthy aristocrat enrols her "illegitimate" 15-year-old grandchild from India. The teachers struggle to integrate the girl, who remains an outsider among her classmates. Miss Pirie and Miss Woods are brought closer to Jane Cumming when her grandmother insists they look after her over the summer. Private and professional lines blur, affection between them grows, and they start to form an unlikely family. Tensions rise as the new term begins. The teachers are overwhelmed with the girl's increasing desire for closeness and their own changing relationship. As Jane Cumming begins to feel excluded from her new family, she demands to be taken home to her grandmother. An accusation follows that leaves the teachers fighting for their lives, resulting in a legal battle that would last a decade and scandalise the Scottish establishment.

This is the synopsis for The Education of Jane Cumming, the new film by German filmmaker Sophie Heldman, the world premiere of which is taking place in the Panorama section of the upcoming Berlinale (12-22 February).

The film is based on Lillian Faderman’s non-fiction book Scotch Verdict: The Real-life Story That Inspired ‘The Children’s Hour’. Faderman says, "A half-century ago, I discovered an 1810 trial transcript that involved two Scottish school mistresses and their Anglo-Indian pupil, the daughter of a young Scottish aristocrat and his paramour in India. The story gripped me so powerfully that it became the subject of my 1983 book Scotch Verdict. After the young aristocrat’s death, his grief-stricken mother had brought the girl to Scotland and sent her to be educated in a boarding school for daughters of the wealthy. There, the girl had been a witness to her school mistresses’ brazen sexual escapades with one another. Or had she? As the court record reveals, the judges in the case struggled to discover the truth, but they were stymied by their deep-set race and class prejudices and their ignorant notions about women’s sexuality. What they missed is what Sophie Heldman’s film, The Education of Jane Cumming, brings to life so vividly: the timeless deep feeling and tenderness, and the poignant sorrow and tragedy, of this fateful encounter between two passionate women and a lost girl."

Sophie Heldman started out working on independent film productions in New York, and then went on to study Directing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB). Her feature debut, Colors in the Dark [+leggi anche:
trailer
scheda film], starring Bruno Ganz and Senta Berger, premiered in competition at the San Sebastián International Film Festival and was a success at the German and Swiss box office. The Education of Jane Cumming is her second feature.

Written by Heldman and lead Scottish actress Flora Nicholson, the film stars Nicholson herself alongside Clare Dunne, Fiona Shaw, Mia Tharia and Rebecca Martin. The Education of Jane Cumming is a German-Swiss-UK co-production, led by Bettina Brokemper, of Germany’s Heimatfilm, with Karin Koch (of Switzerland’s Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion) and Nadira Murray (of Edinburgh-based Sylph Productions) also serving as producers. International sales are handled by Global Constellation.

Check out our exclusive poster below: