Ammonite, a new film from Francis Lee (God’s Own Country) which was set to screen at the Cannes and Telluride Film Festivals before the pandemic hit, has just released its official trailer ahead of its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Writes Variety: “Set in England in the 1800s, Winslet plays Mary Anning, a fossil hunter who works alone on the rugged coastline in the south of the country. With her days of making famous geological discoveries behind her, she now searches for common fossils to sell to tourists to support herself and her sickly mother. One day, a wealthy tourist pays a visit to Mary and asks her to take care of his ailing wife Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), who suffers from “melancholia.” Charlotte’s husband offers too much to turn down, and Mary has herself a new apprentice, albeit one who doesn’t ‘like the water.'”

Lee told Indiewire: “I was very drawn to that period because of this wonderful research into same-sex female relationships of the period that are all very well documented with letters to each other, demonstrating wonderful, life-long, passionate, intense, emotional relationships. And I was fascinated to set this film in a period that was totally patriarchal and where women were completely owned by their fathers or their husbands, and looking at how they live within that world, and also in a world where, at that time, the medical profession believed that women had no sexual-pleasure organs. So, the idea of two women actually in a relationship together was just not a thought anybody ever had within society.”

The film also stars Gemma Jones, James McArdle, Alec Secareanu and Fiona Shaw.