The Lady (2011) - teaser trailer

The Lady, a biopic of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Starring Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis. More details posted earlier.

Synopsis: The Lady is the extraordinary story of Aung San Suu Kyi and her husband, Michael Aris. It is also the story of the peaceful quest of the woman who is at the core of Burma's democracy movement. Despite distance, long separations, and a dangerously hostile regime, their love endures until the very end. It's a story of devotion and human understanding set against a backdrop of political turmoil that continues today. The Lady was written over a period of three years by Rebecca Frayn. Interviews with key figures in Aung San Suu Kyi's entourage enabled her to reconstruct for the first time the true story of Burma‟s national heroine.

Watch video: Director Luc Besson's discusses film

The Lady (2011)

Cast: Michelle Yeoh, David Thewlis
Director: Luc Besson

Summary: A biopic of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the heartrending choice she had to make about whether to return to England and nurse her husband who was dying of cancer, or to carry on fighting for democracy in Burma where the controlling military junta had grown paranoid about her popular support.

From Dark Horizons: "Luc Besson's biopic of current Burmese opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has been shot under top secret conditions in Paris, Bangkok and the UK. As time and production winds on though, it's becoming hard for Besson to keep his film a secret. A release for this Fall in the UK is already locked in though, which means the attention will only become more focused from here on out."

Director Besson talks of what compelled him to tell her story:
“It is the fight of a woman without any weapons, just her kindness and her mentality. [Suu Kyi] is very Gandhi like. She says we should have the right to decide our future, we should have the right to express ourselves. She is asking for things we all have and don’t even think about any more.
How often in history do you have a person, a woman, who never curses, never steals anything, never does anything illegal and you put her under house arrest for 24 years, it is just insane.”

Teaser trailer
IMDb
More photos
Aung San Suu Kyi - article in Wikipedia

Anonymous (2011)

A political thriller about who actually wrote the plays of William Shakespeare - Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford - set against the backdrop of the succession of Queen Elizabeth I, and the Essex Rebellion against her.

Rhys Ifans (Edward De Vere)
Vanessa Redgrave (Queen Elizabeth I)
Joely Richardson (Queen Elizabeth I, younger version)
David Thewlis (William Cecil)
Rafe Spall (Shakespeare)
Jamie Campbell-Bower (young De Vere)
Derek Jacobi (narrator of prologue)

Directed by Roland Emmerich

Emmerich discusses 10 Reasons Why Shakespeare was a Fraud

View trailer

International trailer
Movie photos

Official Site

From Rope of Silicon:

Set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England, Anonymous speculates on an issue that has for centuries intrigued academics and brilliant minds ranging from Mark Twain and Charles Dickens to Henry James and Sigmund Freud, namely: who was the author of the plays credited to William Shakespeare? Experts have debated, books have been written, and scholars have devoted their lives to protecting or debunking theories surrounding the authorship of the most renowned works in English literature. Anonymous poses one possible answer, focusing on a time when cloak-and-dagger political intrigue, illicit romances in the Royal Court, and the schemes of greedy nobles hungry for the power of the throne were exposed in the most unlikely of places: the London stage.

Vanessa Redgrave as Elizabeth I

Joely Richardson and Jamie Campbell-Bower
(young Elizabeth and young De Vere)

Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Roland Emmerich, Joely Richardson, David Thewlis
Photo: Zimbio

Rafe Spall and Rhys Ifans at press conference,
with Rhys' comments getting a laugh from the rest of the cast...

(16 short videos from press conference... you can cycle through or view on Youtube)

David Thewlis:"Some rather extreme things happen and some extreme claims are made but nobody can say it didn't happen which I think is the nice thing about it."

IMDb

Wikipedia