Murtada Elfadl reporting from Sundance

“Show don’t tell” is how Joanna Hogg directs The Souvenir. Hogg is the former photographer and experimental filmmaker behind Archipelago (2010), and Exhibition (2013). Those films made a splash on the European indie scene but not many waves on this side of the Atlantic. Here she withholds the narrative to only slowly reveals what her film is about. We first meet a young film student Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) in 1980s London, trying to make it in film school. Perhaps this is a character study somewhat based on Hogg’s own life? Only later do we discover that it’s about an intense all consuming co-dependent relationship between our lead and a sweet but drug-addicted snobbish man who works for the foreign office (Tom Burke)...