Lena Dunham brings Catherine, Called Birdy to life in new teaser
Bella Ramsey stars in Dunham's long-awaited Medieval coming-of-age film
Thirteen years in the making, and we finally have our first look at Lena Dunham’s Catherine, Called Birdy. Based on Karen Kushman’s 1996 YA novel of the same name, the film stars Bella Ramsey as a young woman set to be married off to boost her father’s waning fortunes.
In the first footage released from Dunham’s latest directorial effort, Birdy gets up to some mischief in her small village of Stonebridge and terrorizes her insolvent father (Fleabag’s Andrew Scott). The period piece is definitely a departure from Dunham’s usual finger-on-the-pulse modern fare, but it’s easy to see why Birdy’s spirit drew her to the story.
The adaptation has been in the works for more than a decade now. Dunham first described her passion project back in 2014, saying the novel is “full of incest and beatings,” but also “hyper-realistic and really pretty.” In the present, the filmmaker was a bit more eloquent about the story, telling Teen Vogue:
“I wanted to highlight this girl who was living in the wrong time. If she was living in 2022, she would be a pretty classic tomboy or able to explore the gender binary, she’d be able to play all the sports she wanted. All of her dreams, which in 1290 are to go to a hanging and run around without a skirt on, would be achievable. But there are still as we know, huge challenges to being a woman in this day and age, and a teenage girl.”
In fact, Dunham said the medieval setting feels a little too relevant: “While it feels very far away that a 13-year-old is being asked to marry a 50-year-old, we still have plenty of barbaric customs that control the way people’s bodies are dealt with.”
She continued, “There’s so many aspects to modern life that still speak to themes of the book. I really love that we were able to highlight aspects of that, and the way the world has changed but also the way it’s stayed the same. And do it with some humor.”
Catherine, Called Birdy also stars Joe Alwyn, Ralph Ineson, Billie Piper, and Isis Hainsworth. The film hits theaters on September 23 and streams on Prime Video October 7.