Letitia Wright, Tamara Lawrance, Nadine Marshall, Michael Smiley
Please note: This title will play in-person at National Science & Media Museum only.
Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s (The Lure) boldly expressive film tells the extraordinary true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twins from the only Black family in Haverfordwest in Wales in the 1970s and ’80s, who grew up communicating with no one but each other.
As children, June (Leah Mondesir-Simmonds) and Jennifer (Eva-Arianna Baxter) are isolated from their community and effectively abandoned by their school and care systems. Subject to bullying and racist abuse, they retreat into a fantasy world of artistic inspiration and adolescent desire. As young women, now played by Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance, they are committed to a notorious institution after a spree of vandalism, where they can choose to separate and survive or face dire consequences together.
June and Jennifer’s singular story could have been given relatively simple treatment, but Smoczyńska’s eerie, wildly inventive film utilises various formal flourishes, including stop-motion animation and elaborate musical fantasies, to channel the inner lives of two talented, disturbed and occasionally violent young women who shared their creativity with the outside world via intensely imaginative poems and stories, but trusted their individual selves only with each other. Brilliantly acted by Wright and Lawrance in particular, The Silent Twins is an infinitely sad look at the failure of Britain’s contemporaneous educational, legal and mental health services to support these vulnerable young girls – by extension, telling a wider story about the lives of other Black Britons of the period as well.