The Souvenir Part II

Joanna Hogg shot The Souvenir Part II in the summer of 2019, only months after its predecessor had won at Sundance, with Ireland's Element Pictures joining BBC Film and Martin Scorsese's Sikelia Productions as producers. Robert Pattinson was originally cast but withdrew to make The Batman, and his role was reconceived as two characters, played by Charlie Heaton and Harris Dickinson. The film premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in July 2021, with A24 releasing it in America that autumn and Picturehouse in Britain the following February.

Honor Swinton Byrne returns as Julie, back at film school in the mid-1980s with her personal life in pieces and her tutors unconvinced by her plans. Her answer is to make her graduation film out of the very thing she is trying to understand. Tilda Swinton again plays her mother, Richard Ayoade is the brash fellow student Patrick, Ariane Labed plays Garance, and Joe Alwyn is Max, the editor who helps her shape the material. Where the first film was hushed and interior, this one is looser, funnier and openly theatrical, moving between Julie's life and the sets she builds to restage it.

Reviews were, if anything, warmer than for the first instalment: critics described it as a luminous self-portrait of the filmmaker as a young woman. It received nine British Independent Film Award nominations, winning for costume design, editing and production design, and in 2025 IndieWire placed it among the best films of the decade so far.