Unrelated

Joanna Hogg (born 20 March 1960, London) is a British film maker and screenwriter. She made her directorial and screenwriting feature film debut in 2007 with Unrelated.

After leaving school in the late 1970s, Hogg worked as a photographer and began to make experimental super 8 films after borrowing a camera from Derek Jarman, who became an early mentor after a chance meeting in Patisserie Valerie in Soho. One of these, a film about a kinetic sculpture by artist Ron Haselden, won her a place to study direction at the National Film and Television School. Her graduation piece Caprice starred a then unknown Tilda Swinton. On graduation, Hogg directed several music videos for artists such as Alison Moyet, and won her first television commission writing and directing a programme segment for Janet Street Porter’s Channel Four series Network 7, Flesh + Blood. In the 1990s, Hogg directed episodes of London Bridge, Casualty and London’s Burning. She also directed the EastEnders special EastEnders: Dot’s Story (2003).

Hogg has said that “I wanted to make a film doing everything I was told not to do in television”. She shot her first feature, Unrelated (2008) in Tuscany. It tells the story of a childless woman, Anna (Kathryn Worth) of around forty who goes on holiday to Italy with her friend Verena (Mary Roscoe) and her teenage family. Over the course of the holiday, tensions emerge as Anna spends less time with the ‘grownups’ and is drawn towards the teenage crowd and the attractions of Verena’s teenage nephew (Tom Hiddleston).

The film received critical acclaim, premiering at the London Film Festival in 2007 and winning the FIPRESCI International Critics Award. It also won the Guardian First Film Award in 2008 and the Evening Standard British Film Awards ‘Most Promising Newcomer’ Award in 2009, as well as being nominated for their Best Film Award and earning Hogg a nomination for the Critics Circle ‘Breakthrough Filmmaker’ Award in 2009.

Her second film Archipelago had its UK premiere at the 2010 London Film Festival, where it was nominated in the Best Film category. It was released in the UK on 4 March 2011 by Artificial Eye.

Hogg’s style is influenced by European and Asian directors such as Eric Rohmer and Yasujirō Ozu, using extended takes and minimal camera movement. She takes the unusual approach of casting a mixture of actors and non-professional actors in her films, such as the landscape painter Christopher Baker in Archipelago. Her depiction of unarguably middle-class characters has prompted some commentators to see her work as spearheading a new type of social realism in British film. —Wikipedia