Jennifer Kent, the film-maker behind critically-acclaimed horror The Babadook, will next direct Alice + Freda Forever, a love story about a relationship between two young women in 19th-century Memphis.
Based on the non-fiction book by Alexis Coe, Alice + Freda Forever charts the short, tragic life of Alice Mitchell, a 19-year-old Tennessee native who pretended to be a man in order to marry her lover, 17-year-old Frida Ward. The pair were forcibly separated when their love letters were discovered. Alice slashed her lover’s throat with a razor after Frida decided to stop speaking to her.
The murder and Alice’s lesbianism were deemed acts of insanity and she was committed to an asylum, where she died a few years later under mysterious circumstances. The case obsessed the US at the time, spreading a rash of pop-culture depictions of lesbians that portrayed them as masculine and murderous.
“Jennifer’s debut film was one of the most accomplished I have ever seen and I’m thrilled she shares the same passion for telling this powerful, intense and unfortunately still timely story,” producer Sarah Schechter told Variety.
Kent, from Brisbane, Australia, got an early break assisting Lars von Trier on the Nicole Kidman-starring Dogville. The Babadook, her debut film, told the story of a single mother plagued by a supernatural monster after reading a bedtime story to her son. The film made many critics best of 2014 lists, with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calling it a “clever, nasty, clammily claustrophobic chiller”.
The director has at least two other projects in the works: a revenge thriller set in 1820s Tasmania and a family drama based on the last week of her dad’s life. HBO are said to be courting her to develop a TV series.
