AFI Fest 2023 has unveiled the full line-up of the 37th edition of the festival, including the World Premiere of Matthew Brown's Freud's Last Session starring Anthony Hopkins.
Filmed on location in Ireland, Freud's Last Session is an Irish/UK co-production, supported by Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland and the UK Global Screen Fund. The film will receive its World Premiere on Friday, 27th October as part of the festival's Special Screening line-up.
Set in London 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins), hosts Oxford don and committed Christian C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) at his Hampstead home. Lewis, who would later author The Chronicles of Narnia, had recently written a minor fantasy novel that lightly spoofed the great doctor from Vienna and is sheepishly apologetic about it.
Freud finds Lewis’ firm faith in a higher being unpersuasive at best, and prefers instead to explore the unexamined corners in Lewis’ life: his relationships to his late mother and his estranged father, his PTSD following service in the Great War, and his unusual relationship with his live-in companion, Janie Moore (Orla Brady), the mother of a fallen comrade. But then Freud, too, is tuning out things in his life: the need for his daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) to live her life authentically, the seriousness of his cancer and worsening drug dependency, and the outbreak of war on the radio news.
Freud's Last Session is directed by Matthew Brown and written by Mark St. Germain with revisions by Brown, based on the play of the same name. Irish producers on the project are Tristan Orpen Lynch and Aoife O’Sullivan of Subotica Productions (Aisha, Joyride) alongside Alan Greisman, Hannah Leader, Rick Nicita, Robert Stillman, and Meg Thomson. Niamh Fagan serves as executive producer for Screen Ireland. Sales on the film are being handled by Westend Films and CAA Media Finance.
The 37th AFI Fest features an expanded selection of features and shorts compared, offering 141 titles for the public to enjoy across five days from 25th-29th October.
Click here for the full line-up announcement for the American Film Institute Film Festival 2023.
