Mamma Mia!

Colour, 35 mm
United Kingdom, USA, 2008, 100 min
Section: Official Selection - Out of Competition

Synopsis

This enchanting film adaptation of the famous musical, seen by over thirty million people in 160 cities worldwide, is undoubtedly this summer’s most anticipated film. It tells the story of a single mother who owns a little hotel on an idyllic Greek island. As she prepares to marry off her daughter Sophie, the bride-to-be wants to know who her father is before the wedding bells start ringing. To her mother’s surprise, three men turn up on the doorstep of her picturesque house, all of them people she knew intimately twenty years earlier. Which of them is Sophie’s father? The excellent Meryl Streep in the role of the mother is supported by Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård playing her suitors of long ago. This sunlit romantic comedy, written by the author of the original stage play, Catherine Johnson, and involving the participation of former ABBA members Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, also draws its rousing energy from the chart-topping songs by the legendary Swedish pop band.

About the director

Phyllida Lloyd (b. 1957, Bristol, Great Britain) graduated from Birmingham University in 1979 and then spent five years working in BBC television drama. She has been closely involved in the theatre since the mid-1980s. She was Associate Director at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham and the Bristol Old Vic, and then directed acclaimed productions at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. She gave her debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991 in a production of Thomas Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso. She is also a successful opera director and performed Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana, whose film version she directed in 2000. The previous year she received an offer to direct the stage musical Mamma Mia!, which became a global hit. This year’s film adaptation is the director’s feature film debut.