The Jane Austen Book Club

Today, up-country California may be far enough from English dominance, but some things never change. Californians are to this day concerned with the complexities of marriage, friendship, of romantic relationships, social position and good manners – just as they were in Jane Austen’s time in the mid eighteen hundreds. Life for a group of friends today is described from the caustic point of view of the literary heroine. Six members of a book club, six Austen novels, six stories intertwined over the course of six months in the modern and populated setting of Sacramento where city and quiet suburb make for natural beauty. Even if their stories are not really like those of Austen’s time, the six characters find similarities, prognoses, wisdom, and advice in the writer`s much-loved narrative.

Born in South Carolina (USA), she grew up in the north of up-country Florida and in southeast Georgia. She began to write and to direct short films when she was still at Florida State University where she studied English Literature and Theater. She began as a playwright for theater (comedies and drama off-Broadway) and focused on audiovisuals as from 1980. She worked as a photographer for local newspapers, for a TV news program and for the Florida Game and Fish Commission. She then began to write and to produce educational films. She is better known for her work as scriptwriter, mainly for her adaptations of Little Women (1994), The Perez Family (1995), Matilda (1996, written in partnership with her husband Nicholas Kazan), Practical Magic (1998) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). She directed a short film, The Red Coat (2003). The Jane Austen Book Club is her first feature.

43ª MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE CINEMA

43ª MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE CINEMA