Following a premiere at BFI London Film Festival, where it was warmly received, we’re still not sure here in the U.S. when we’ll see the WWI biographical drama Testament of Youth, but those in the U.K. will get it early next year, and today brings a new trailer. Led by rising star Alicia Vikander, she stars as Vera Brittain, a young Englishwoman who not only experienced World War I from the nurse’s perspective, but also chronicled those trials in her seminal memoir.
“Striking an elegantly sustained balance between intimacy and historical scope, [the film] encompasses nearly all of the virtues of classical British period drama and nearly none of the vices,” THR said in their review. Coming from director James Kent, check out the trailer below for the film also starring Kit Harington, Taron Egerton, Emily Watson, Hayley Atwell, Colin Morgan, Joanna Scanlan, Alexandra Roach, Jonathan Bailey,Anna Chancellor, Nicholas Le Prevost, Nicholas Farrell, Dominic West and Miranda Richardson.
TESTAMENT OF YOUTH is a searing story of love and war. Based on the classic First World War memoir, this is the incredible true story of one young woman’s struggle to survive the horrors of war, which robbed her of everyone and everything she held dear, but was ultimately unable to break her extraordinary spirit.
Vera Brittain, irrepressible, intelligent and free-minded, overcomes the prejudices of her family and hometown to win a scholarship to Oxford. With everything to live for, she falls in love with her brother’s close friend Roland Leighton as they go to University to pursue their literary dreams. But the First World War is looming and as the boys leave for the front Vera realises she cannot sit idly by as her peers fight for their country, so volunteers as a nurse. She works tirelessly, experiencing all the grief of war, as one by one her fiancé, her brother and their closest friends are all killed and the pillars of her world shattered. But, an indefatigable spirit, Vera endures and returns to Oxford, irrevocably changed, yet determined to create a world in which such a war can never take place again.
Testament of Youth opens on January 16th, 2015 in the U.K.