DUBAI: Lebanese filmmaker Mounia Akl is to direct British actress Kate Winslet in “The Unheard,” a five-episode limited series for Netflix written by British writer Jack Thorne, the Emmy-winning creator of “Adolescence.”
Winslet stars alongside British actress Maxine Peake as sisters who flee when a revenge plot they have planned collapses.
Pursued by the authorities, the pair confront the secrets that drove them to violence. Trade reports have likened the premise to British director Ridley Scott’s “Thelma & Louise.” Filming is due to begin in 2027, and Netflix has not announced a release date.
The series marks Winslet’s first drama series for Netflix. She won an Emmy for HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” in 2021 and an earlier Emmy for “Mildred Pierce.”
“The Unheard” is produced by Warp Films, US actor Brad Pitt’s Plan B and British actor Stephen Graham’s Matriarch Productions.
Akl made her feature debut with “Costa Brava, Lebanon,” which was shot in late 2020 and premiered at the Venice Film Festival the following year. The film won the NETPAC Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, the audience award at the BFI London Film Festival and the FIPRESCI Award for best debut film at Egypt’s El-Gouna Film Festival, where it also took the inaugural Green Star award for sustainability.
It followed the Badri family, who left a polluted Beirut for the mountains only for a landfill to be built beside their home. The real Costa Brava site opened outside Beirut in 2016. Akl previously told Arab News: “I made a film about a family living in the mountains and it is set in the mountains, but the film is about Beirut.”
Her earlier short “Submarine,” which screened in the Cinefondation section at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, dealt with Lebanon’s garbage crisis. She called it “a fragment of ‘Costa Brava’ in many ways.
“I’ve always been obsessed with family and how, by observing the structure of a family, you can understand the cracks in a society,” she said. Akl also said: “I don’t think filmmakers should have messages in their films, but raise questions.”
