WestEnd Films is launching international sales in Berlin on The Last Day, the feature directorial debut of acclaimed visual artist Rachel Rose, toplined by Alicia Vikander, Wagner Moura and Victoria Pedretti.
The London-based sales outfit unveiled a first-look image of the film, currently in post-production, at the European Film Market on Thursday as sales activity was getting underway. CAA Media Finance and UTA Independent Film Group are co-representing North American rights on the title.
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, The Last Day unfolds over the course of a single summer day in New York, tracing a fleeting encounter between two mothers at moments of private reckoning. Vikander plays Julia, a writer grappling with creative paralysis, unresolved grief and the onset of her daughter’s adolescence. An unexpected encounter with Taylor (Pedretti), a labor and delivery nurse navigating a postpartum crisis, unsettles Julia’s hard-won equilibrium and forces her to reconsider the life she has constructed. Moura, currently nominated for an Oscar, co-stars as Julia’s husband, a steady but increasingly distant presence whose own tensions and blind spots underscore the fractures emerging within the family.
Rose, whose work has been exhibited at institutions including LACMA, Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art, makes her feature debut with the project. A veteran of the Venice Biennale and Carnegie International, and a recipient of the Frieze Artist Award, Rose has built a reputation in the art world for formally rigorous, conceptually layered work.
“Becoming a mother felt to me like a collision between a beginning and a threat, and I knew I needed to write from the existential tension of that contradiction,” Rose said in a statement. “In Mrs. Dalloway, I was struck by how Virginia Woolf reveals Clarissa’s self-erasure not through overt drama, but through the texture of a single, ordinary day — errands, chance encounters — until something immense has shifted inside her. That structure became my guide.”
The film is produced by Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler, whose Killer Films banner has shepherded a slate of recent arthouse standouts, including Past Lives, Materialists and May December. David Kaplan, Lucie Elwes and Rose also produce, with Maja Hoffmann and Lucas Hoffmann executive producing.
Behind the camera, Rose’s team includes cinematographer Eric Yue (I Saw the TV Glow, A Thousand and One), editor Taylor Levy (Bodies Bodies Bodies, A Different Man), costume designer April Napier (Lady Bird, May December) and Emmy-winning music supervisor Susan Jacobs.
WestEnd has boarded the film under its WeLove label, which focuses on female-driven stories and championing female talent.
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