Vita and Virginia

Vita and Virginia

British director Chanya Button (Burn Burn Burn) is set to direct Dame Eileen Atkins’ script Vita and Virginia which chronicles the romance and friendship between authors Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Mirror Productions’ Evangelo Kioussis will produce alongside Katie Holly of Blinder Films and Simon Baxter who will serve as EP. Button’s BIFA-nominated debut feature film Burn Burn Burn was backed by Creative England and made its world premiere at the London Film Festival last year. That dark comedy starred Laura Carmichael, Chloe Pirrie and Jack Farthing (“Poldark”). Pic recently screened at the Seattle Film Festival in Official Competition, and Button won the BFI LOCO Film Festival’s Discover Award for an outstanding debut feature back in April. Button is also attached to direct Shore, a postapocalyptic sci-fi pic written by Melissa Iqbal and produced by Kitty Kaletsky of Midnight Road Entertainment.

source: deadline

More from the guardian:

Vita and Virginia, Eileen Atkins’s fictionalisation of the friendship and affair of writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, is finally heading to the big screen.

No casting has yet been announced, but the director is Chanya Button, whose female buddy comedy Burn Burn Burn was a hit at last autumn’s London film festival.

The movie is an adaptation of Atkins’ play of the same name, which premiered in 1992, three years after she toured the world in a stage adaptation of Woolf’s collected lectures. The actor adapted her own script for the screen in 2000, shortly before she was cast in a minor role in Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, which she was not wholly impressed by.

In 2007, Atkins said:

It’s not that the portrait of her is wrong, but it’s only her depression. It came as a real thrill to me that I made people go back and read it and see how witty she was. When I first got the script, I threw it from one end of my apartment to the other. I thought, right, OK, you’ve had your temper. It’s going to be done anyway, so grit your teeth, take the day’s filming, have a day with Meryl Streep and fuck everybody. And that’s what I did. It’s over and it was a success and that’s fine. But I just wish somebody would do my script.

The relationship between the two Bloomsbury luminaries began in 1922 and lasted around a decade, although they remained friends until Woolf’s death in 1941. The novelist dedicated 1928’s Orlando to Sackville-West; Vita’s son, Nigel Nicholson, called it “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature”.