Possibly keen to take advantage of the womens issues cinema that proved a modest success- if with extremely mediocre material- for Made in Dagenham last year,
Film4 have purchased a script by award winning playwright
Abi Morgan about the suffragette movement of the early twentieth century in the UK and their fight to earn the vote for women. The film will simply be titled
Suffragettes.
Sarah Gavron will direct, with whom Morgan also worked on an adaptation of celebrated best-selling novel Brick Lane a depiction of life in a second-generation Anglo-Indian community- for which she received modest reviews upon release back in 2007. The meantime has seen Gavron employed in television and factual work, including a documentary already in production, At the End of the World, set in Greenland. The Film4 project (in collaboration with Focus Features) has employed Ruby Films as producers (who also worked on Brick Lane) and the script is, apparently, currently in an early draft form and maybe subject to extensive re-writes in pre-production. Morgan has been particularly busy writing for screen of late; having earned the bulk of her reputation in theatre, having scripted the forthcoming Margaret Thatcher biopic starring Meryl Streep
called The Iron Lady. Another of her screenplays,
Shame, co-written with its British director Steve McQueen, is in production for Film4 and See-Saw Films. Both should see 2012 releases.