Bel Powley stars in the trailer for Ashes in the Snow, a film adaptation of Ruta Sepetys’ novel Between Shades of Gray. Powley has been acting for more than a decade now, but it was her role in 2015’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl that really put her name on the map stateside. The film revolved around a teen artist growing up in San Francisco circa the 1970s, and landed Powley multiple film festival and critic circle award nominations for her performance. She’s since gone to appear in films like the biopic Mary Shelly and this year’s White Boy Rick, in addition to her role in Ashes in the Snow.
Powley stars in Ashes in the Snow as Lina Vilkas, a(nother) teenaged artist who (circa 1941) lives with her family in Lithuania and is preparing to go to art school. However, everything changes when Lina and her loved ones are deported to a work camp in Siberia, as the result of Joseph Stalin’s cruel dismantling of the Baltic region. The film’s marketing is now getting underway, ahead of its U.S. release next year.
The Ashes in the Snow trailer is now online, courtesy of Vertical Entertainment. Sepetys’ book was adapted for the big screen by screenwriter Ben York Jones (Like Crazy) and marks the feature directorial debut for Marius A. Markevicius (who served as a co-producer on Like Crazy, among other films). For more, watch the film’s trailer in the space below.
Ashes in the Snow, as its trailer demonstrates, follows Lina as she decides to chronicle everything that her family (and the thousands like them) experience by documenting it through her art and notes. Of course, as briefly seen here, Lina’s artwork ultimately bring her unwanted attention from the officers and guards that run her work camp, further threatening her life in the process. Lina’s story is very much one that’s designed to speak to teenagers and young adults directly; in fact, Sepetys almost released her original novel as a piece of YA literature, for that same reason.
All things considered, Ashes in the Snow seems like a worthy addition to the larger pantheon of films about WWII. It certainly explores an important historical event from the war that most Americans probably aren’t familiar with (Stalin’s genocide of the Baltic people), and promises to be a well-acted drama with Powley as its lead. The film has already made a positive impact, having been screened for members of the U.S. Congress back in April, as a way of familiarizing them with Lithuanian history during the second world war. Hopefully, Ashes in the Snow will continue to leave a good impression when it hits the States in 2019.
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Ashes in the Snow hits select U.S. theaters and becomes available On Demand on January 11, 2019.
Source: Vertical Entertainment
