The Lost Daughter

Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter premiered in competition at the 78th Venice Film Festival in September 2021, where Gyllenhaal won the Golden Osella for Best Screenplay, then opened the New York Film Festival the following month. It is the actor's writing and directing debut, adapted from Elena Ferrante's 2006 novel La figlia oscura, and a UK-Greece-Israel-US co-production produced by Endeavor Content with Netflix taking worldwide distribution rights. The film was shot in 2020 on the Greek island of Spetses.

Olivia Colman leads as Leda, with Jessie Buckley as the younger Leda in flashback, Dakota Johnson as Nina and Paul Mescal as a beach attendant; Ed Harris and Peter Sarsgaard appear in supporting parts. Cinematographer Hélène Louvart (The Beaches of Agnès, Happy as Lazzaro) shoots in handheld 35mm with a watchful, occasionally voyeuristic camera; the score is by Dickon Hinchliffe, formerly of Tindersticks. The structure cuts freely between two Greek summers thirty years apart.

The film was nominated for three Academy Awards (Best Actress for Colman, Supporting Actress for Buckley and Adapted Screenplay for Gyllenhaal), with parallel BAFTA nominations and three Gotham Independent Film Awards, including Best Feature. Critics in The Guardian, The New York Times and Sight & Sound placed it on year-end lists; Sight & Sound later named it among the most accomplished directorial debuts of the decade so far. It is now widely cited as one of the closest screen adaptations of Ferrante's voice on motherhood, ambition and refusal.