Film Facts

• THE SEA CHANGE is based on the novel ISLAND by award-winning author Jane Rogers. Published by Abacus books in 1999, it was long-listed for the Orange Prize and was a New York Times ‘Notable Book’. The novel has sold over 50,000 copies worldwide and remains an international Book Club favourite.


• THE SEA CHANGE is a fairytale thriller: a tale of love and hate between a brother and sister, the murder of their mother and the magic of a remote Scottish island.


• THE SEA CHANGE will be shot in Glasgow and the Highlands of Scotland with just three main characters to create a unique and ravishing cinematic thriller.

Synopsis

Abandoned at birth, Nikki Black has spent most of her young life in foster homes and ‘care’. Incapable of love or of being loved, paralyzed by attacks of Fear and desperate for revenge, she decides to find her birth mother, confront her…then kill her.

Nikki travels up incognito to the remote and magical Hebrides where her mother, Phyllis, now lives. Upon arrival she discovers she has a half brother, Calum. As the weeks pass and she plots the perfect murder of her mother, she awakens to the beauty of the island, her beguiling brother and their shared passion for story telling.      

Influences for THE SEA CHANGE include Dickens’ Great Expectations for its triangle of tangled relationships, Shakespeare’s The Tempest for the magical other-worldliness of an island and Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake for its focus on female-led story and emotion. THE SEA CHANGE’s uncompromising, controversial twist on a classical tragedy makes the story at once modern and universal. It raises profoundly important issues about identity, family and personal responsibility whilst allowing the power of love and imagination (accompanied by no small dose of black humour) to soar.

Part myth, part mystery, the film is an actors’ piece with just three main characters facing a series of exceptional, terrifying events. The intensity of the story, and the chance to portray such nuanced characters, have contributed to the level of interest already expressed in the project.