The trailer for 2015’s feminist movie Suffragette is here!
It’s so exciting that Suffragette is going to open this year’s London film festival! Without further ado, here’s the recently released trailer:
“We break windows. We burn things. Because war’s the only language men listen to.”
There have been distressingly few films about women’s suffrage over the years (weird, isn’t it, how the words ‘suffer’ and ‘rage’ seem to be so deeply, though coincidentally rooted in the word?). Notably there was Iron Jawed Angels (Hilary Swank, Margo Martindale and Anjelica Huston star in this 2004 film about the 1917 women’s suffrage movement in the USA). Cinematic coverage of such a pivotal movement in history is few and far between, however.
Let’s face it: We can’t forever keep nodding sagely and singing along with Mrs. Winifred Banks to “Sister Suffragette” in Mary Poppins (though doing so is undeniably lovely!)
Now, finally, Carey Mulligan stars along with Meryl Streep in Suffragette, a drama directed by Sarah Gavron about the British suffragrettes who fought for women’s right to vote. It’s the first full-length film to do so. It’s horrifying that it’s taken this long. But, at last, it’s happened.
Meryl Streep plays Emmeline Pankhurst, who co-founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. The union carried out hunger strikes and other forms of direct activism to protest the lack of franchisement for women. It took courage and sacrifice on an unprecendented scale to make a patriarchal government system wake up.
“The mere fact that it’s taken 100 years for this story to be told is hugely revealing,” said Carey Mulligan in an interview with Time Out magazine in April 2015. “We’re half the human race,” says Mulligan’s character, Maud, shortly after a scene where she’s placed a bomb inside a post box and watched it explode. “You can’t stop us all.”
Well, quite.
Suffragette looks to be a film that has something to say and won’t shy away from saying it. Those of us mere mortals not attending the London film festival’s opening will nevertheless be able to watch the film on 7th October 2015, when it opens in UK cinemas nationwide.