TSPDT

Key Production Countries: UK, USA
Key Genres: Drama, Psychological Drama, Family Drama, Romance, Mystery, Romantic Drama
Key Collaborators: Helle le Fevre (Editor), Stéphane Collonge (Production Designer), Tilda Swinton (Leading Actress), Tom Hiddleston (Leading Actor), Ed Rutherford (Cinematographer), Honor Swinton Byrne (Leading Actress), Andrew Lowe (Producer), Ed Guiney (Producer), Emma Norton (Producer), Luke Schiller (Producer), Gayle Griffiths (Producer), David Raedeker (Cinematographer)

"Joanna Hogg specialises in scathing and unsettling depictions of the British upper middle class. Her first three features, Unrelated, Archipelago, and Exhibition will make you squirm uncomfortably in your seat. They’ll also leave you marveling at Hogg’s meticulous blocking, sound design, and keen observations about human behaviour. Where Unrelated and Archipelago were realist dramas about the pressures of family vacations in tight quarters, Exhibition and The Souvenir are more experimental and dreamlike, exploring the creative process and its links to memory." - Seventh Row

"Though she started making experimental films with a Super 8 camera borrowed from mentor Derek Jarman when she was barely 20, Joanna Hogg was 47 years old when she directed her first feature, 2007’s Unrelated. Her late start may account somewhat for the total assurance of that film and those that follow—the manner in which she immediately establishes her distinctively distanced, observational style; her enigmatic balance of tone; and her favorite subjects for study." - Metrograph

"Joanna Hogg practiced photography before attending the National Film and Television School in 1981. She made several experimental Super 8 films at the time. Caprice (1986), her short graduation film with the then-unknown Tilda Swinton made an impression. She went on to shoot several clips for artists and worked in television. It took some years for Joanna Hogg to muster the courage to make a feature film. Her first attempt was masterly. With Unrelated (2007), shot at the age of 47, she immediately demonstrated an extremely keen observation of group dynamics and class relations and an equally delicate and vertiginous mastery of directing." - Centre Pompidou, 2023

"Marked by a greater narrative and formal inclusiveness and range than she has tended to be credited with by traditionally auteurist critics, Hogg’s films have so far resisted strict categorisation according to genre or style, existing in open discourse with a range of formal and narrative traditions, and inclusive of a melodramatic mode of representation. No doubt, Hogg’s films will continue to engender sustained critical analysis as she releases films that expand the generic scope of realism in the cinema, alongside the representation of—and provision for—the female experience with which she is actively engaged." - Ciara Barrett (Alphaville Journal of Film and Screen Media)

"For the past 20 years, she’s often traversed critical debates under the ill-fitting label of “breakthrough talent”. It’s a testament of the amnesiac variety with which her films have been received: critically acclaimed and yet summarily forgotten – or at any rate, seldom granted the visibility and prominence they deserve. Hogg made her directorial debut with Caprice, a 1986 short starring Tilda Swinton (a then unknown 26 year-old) as a young woman caught in a Technicolor Oz-style trip into her favourite fashion magazine. Twenty years and several TV projects later, she returned to the big screen with her feature debut Unrelated (2007)" - Leonardo Goi (Senses of Cinema, 2020)

"I don’t know how I fit into other traditions. I just know that I have an instinct for doing a particular kind of thing and that I’m completely uncompromising. The fact that I’m managing to make the films in that uncompromising way says something, because it’s very difficult. I tend to keep my stories quite contained. It’s about retaining that creative space for myself." - Joanna Hogg (Reverse Shot, 2014)