I have a good feeling that Luc Besson’s The Lady is going to be one of my favourite films of the year by a long way. We got the first teaser trailer for it back in the summer, followed by the first full trailer last month, and both looked absolutely incredible.
It was selected as the closing film to conclude this year’s Doha Tribeca Film Festival, for which we partnered with Cinémoi to bring you coverage, and you can read our 5-star review of the film here.
We’ve now got a new international trailer for the film to bring you, courtesy of FilmoFilia, and it is every bit as powerful as everything we’ve seen so far. It will make your spine tingle and bring tears to your eyes, which is precisely what I’m expecting to happen throughout the film when it is released here next month.
The Lady looks at the incredibly moving true story of Aung San Suu Kyi (played by Michelle Yeoh), the Burmese opposition political leader, who sacrifices her own happiness for her people. She married Dr. Michael Aris (played by David Thewlis) in 1972 and had two children with him. But in 1988, she returned to Burma to help her sick mother, and later became the leader of the pro-democracy movement against the dictatorship government, which ultimately led to a life under house arrest for a total of a decade and a half.
In 1997, Aris was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and despite appeals from powerful figures and countries, including the Pope and the US, the Burmese government would not grant him a visa to their country to visit his wife. Instead, they told her she could leave the country to visit him, but she feared that if she did that, she would never be allowed to re-enter Burma, and hopes of democracy for the country might die if she did.
The film has certainly got what sounds like well-deserved attention for the coming Oscar race, and I’m really hoping that it will be nominated across the board come the end of January when the nominees are announced. The Lady will be released on 30th December here in the UK, just in time to catch it before the end of the year, and it’s a date that I really can’t wait for. Without further ado, here’s the brilliant new trailer to take a look at. There are a few parts where the necessary subtitles are in French, but the images speak for themselves. Definitely powerful stuff.
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwFnPU8Q8BU’]
