Lena Dunham’s Next Project Will Be a Period Film, In Every Sense of the Word

Lena Dunham has announced a return to filmmaking. At the 15th New Yorker Festival, held over the weekend, she spilled the beans on her plans to adapt and direct Karen Cushman’s coming-of-age novel Catherine, Called Birdy.

“I’ve been obsessed with it since I was a kid,” Dunham told author Ariel Levy on Friday night. In fact, in a 2012 interview with the New York Times, she identified it and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita as the “two best books about girls” she had ever read.

It's a project that will allow the Girls creator to extend her voice well beyond beyond her generation. Narrated as a diary and set in England in the 1290s, Catherine, Called Birdy recounts a 13-year-old girl’s struggle against arranged marriage. “[She] gets her period and her father basically says, 'Well, it's time for you to get married,' and she's like, 'Uh, no,'" Dunham explained. “It's hyper realistic and really pretty and it's full of incest and beatings, but it's a child's story.”

Fortunately there were no Q-Tips in the 1290s, so audiences will at least be spared that Dunham-patented horror. The writer-director is intending to produce the film via her production company, A Casual Romance, which she set up with Jenni Konner, executive producer of Girls. However, they’re still in need financial support from “someone who wants to a fund a PG-13 medieval movie.”

In the meantime, she is busy promoting her debut essay collection, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s 'Learned'.

Via Indiewire.