Sunday night was the U.S. premiere of “Broken English,” Sundance Film Festival’s Director of Programming Kim Yutani told the Eccles crowd.
While it first showed at the Venice International Film Festival in September, Yutani said the festival team decided to bring it to the U.S. under the Spotlight category, which is “our shorthand way of saying these are films we love that have played other festivals,” she said.
For co-directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the inclusion in the 2026 Sundance Film Festival was like coming home.
The two premiered their first feature film, “20,000 Days on Earth,” at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, where they also received the Directing Award. Forsyth and Pollard both admitted that it was during that time, at Sundance, where they first became filmmakers.
“It’s such a nourishing, brilliant space for filmmakers,” Pollard said. “It looks after directors. The craft and the thought and the care and the politics of filmmaking all seem to be right at the forefront of it. Our life changed then.”
Now, 12 years later, they returned to Park City — just in time before the festival’s move — with another unique film that remembers the life of UK singer Marianne Faithfull.
But they’re not just remembering her life; they’re interested in “not forgetting.”
Pollard said that distinction had been on her mind since reading of an incident in the UK where a group of people pulled down a statue of a slave trader and threw it in the harbor, and the subsequent editorial pieces.
“That idea of memorialization, who gets to choose who’s remembered? How are they remembered? What enables that? Is it through archive, through statue, through portraiture? And I think our, am I allowed to say gift? Our talent, maybe, is for portraiture. That’s what I think we do best,” she said.
Faithfull is a perfect subject, the two said, because so much of her life has been remembered incorrectly, the result of skewed, misogynistic media coverage.
“So many things about Marianne had been written that were untrue or they had a kernel of truth, but they’d been twisted into something really unrepresentative of the real Marianne. But all this data, because it’s in the newspapers, because it’s in the media, it exists. And because it exists, it persists,” Forsyth said.
So having Faithfull tell her own story, her own truth, was important to them. But it’s not enough to just sit her in front of a journalist, Pollard said. They wanted to create an environment where Faithfull would reveal the “gems” of her life on her own, in her own way.
The result is a semi-fictitious story told by the Ministry of Not Forgetting, a made-up research facility led by Tilda Swinton and George MacKay. Pollard said, as filmmakers, the two are obsessed with the limbo between fiction and nonfiction, something that musicians and artists are also playing with.
“Those parameters seem to enable or facilitate a kind of honesty that’s really surprising,” Pollard said of creating a fake scenario. “I think particularly for creatives, where their character, their persona, is part of their work … often when put in front of more journalistic documentarians, (they) are going to worry about the cracks, or the exposure of the real person being shown. And I’m just not interested in that.”
The directors said it was actually the interviews with Faithfull, led by MacKay, that happened first, and then the full story began to unfold.
“It’s a huge opportunity to really test your subject and find out what they are interested in,” Forsyth said. “It’s sort of like making two films, in a way, isn’t it? Which is not an easy way to make a film.”
Pollard added: “I find it just the most exhilarating way to work because you’re discovering the film as you’re making it. You’ll see the things that start to spark her eyes, or where you can tell her heart’s engaged, and so you go further with that.”
For example, one round-table discussion between women art historians, authors and film directors shown in the film was an unexpected result of that early time with Faithfull.
“Marianne says to George that she doesn’t want to talk about the newspaper about the Redlands drug bust, but she says offhand, ‘But you can show it to them.’ And we didn’t know who she was talking about,” Pollard said. “And then we thought, wait a minute, with a clever bit of scripting, we could make a ‘them.’ So we pulled together the table of incredible women.”
Having MacKay as part of the process was also influential to the finished product. Forsyth said, because he was the one interviewing an un-scripted Faithfull, MacKay’s script was more like a flow chart, hoping to anticipate where the subject would take the conversation.
“When the script fails, when you’re completely off book and Marianne says something utterly random that nobody could have planned for, you need someone … who’s going to stay in character and be able to busk their way through that situation,” Forsyth said. “We knew we could trust George to do that, but to do it with the backing of his great technical skill as an actor.”
Not only is MacKay a naturally curious person, Forsyth said he went beyond memorizing words on the page, but actually embodied the character in the script and how they would respond and navigate such an interview.
So much of the film becomes a conversation about the artists and musicians and poets that Faithfull surrounded herself with in life. It also tracks the evolution of her own sound and includes renditions of her songs by Beth Orton, Courtney Love, Nick Cave and Suki Waterhouse, along with Faithfull’s own, her last performance before she died, which closed out the film.
That “not forgetting” continued following the Sunday premiere with a tribute performance by Rufus Wainwright and Norah Jones.
The directors said “Broken English” isn’t meant for fans of Faithfull, but is a creative, feminist film that anyone can appreciate.
“I hope the film is a small act of correction. I hope we’re dropping into the noise about Marianne Faithfull something that is perhaps a bit more reflective of the truth, or at least her truth,” Forsyth said.
Pollard said it’s not just relevant in the unique case of Faithfull and should have viewers contemplating how to best preserve people’s lives.
“Living in a world now where there is real threat to the persistence of female legacy — I mean, it’s always been problematic, but as books are being removed from libraries or histories edited and rewritten, I think it’s so important that we … have to be an active participant in the generation of and perpetuation of knowledge, and of the right knowledge being available,” she said. “This is, I hope, an important film, because it just might make a difference about how we value and talk about and honor our female legacies, female artistry.”
‘Broken English’ in-person screenings
- 4 p.m., Jan. 28, Megaplex Redstone 1
- 12:30 p.m., Jan. 30, Megaplex Redstone 1
- 11:30 a.m., Feb. 1, The Ray Theatre